The paradoxes of relative existence

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The continuation of the discussion:

Danijel wrote:
This is the paradox: if you’re conditioned, are you truly responsible for your actions? Vipassana helps in that regard, that much is certain.
I would say that in such a state of conditioned routine, you are not really yourself. Only when the shackles of human illusion are broken and you are in the state of darshan of God, do you truly start to remember yourself.

Robin wrote:
I guess that Karman is conditioned and the consequences of actions in the sphere of karma always have to play out, but technically Karman it is also matter and devoid of intrinsic self. Using your analogy of aggregation of karma as grains of sand arranging themselves into a microprocessor, if the Karman is the microprocessor and brahman defined as selfness is the electricity, without the electricity the microprocessor is inert, but when the electricity is turned on, the selfness of Brahman is manifested through the constraints of the microprocessor.

There are some constraints I need to point out. First, when we’re talking about karma, on the levels of kalapas and the karmic aggregates, the concept of electricity animating the otherwise inert microprocessor doesn’t apply. The karmic particles possess their own “light”, or “electricity” in this analogy; this alone makes them a weird kind of entity because in this world, nothing behaves this way, but in the astral world that would be considered perfectly normal because everything behaves this way there. This means you have a microprocessor consisting of tiny constituents – not so much transistors as logic circuits – that also produce electricity by being natural conduits for the light of God. This is because the very structure of the world (the real one) is upside-down from all expectations for this one, and this is also why I will need to be pointing out those differences regularly, because they are quite easy to forget here. For instance, another analogy for a kalapa is if you take a piece of black nylon, and put it against a light. Nothing goes through. Now take a needle and poke a hole through nylon, repeat the process and you have a tiny dot of light. Make several dots of light in close proximity to each other and now you have a good deal of transparency for light. Now imagine those “holes” being n-dimensional entities (where n is a Hausdorff dimension) that move around and associate on their own, basically a hole being an actual entity and not absence, and the light it radiates gives it inherent spiritual properties, albeit on a microscopic level. It wants to be with more and greater light, on many dimensions of existence, and there you get the fundamental driving mechanism of karma.

Robin wrote:
But then something weird seems to happen, where the unconstrained awareness of Brahman seems to forget itself and identifies with the limitations of the microprocessor and thinks it is separate from other microprocessors under the illusion that it is somehow a sperate entity responsible for its actions and making choices where in fact its simply manifesting programming of the microprocessor.

I don’t think that’s the point where we get the paradox. We get it at the level of kalapas, because that’s where I see the weird stuff going on. Each of them seems to behave independently, and yet when they aggregate they behave similarly to the way neurons behave in a brain, yet with more flexibility, and not necessarily any spatial constraints, meaning the parts of your “spirit-brain” can be located all over the place and still be as immediately interconnected as neurons in your brain; you can literally be spliced across worlds and still function as a singular spiritual entity. Also, are they entities, or are they merely n-dimensional coordinates that “access” infinity, and the “entity” part is merely a function of “n” being a right type of a number, meaning the dimensions include space of some kind? People say the quantum theory is difficult, but it only seems to be difficult if you use obscure descriptive models, and the paradoxes involved are tiny. Here, the paradoxes involved are orders of magnitude greater, because we’re dealing with “pixels of spirituality” of sorts, that come from unmanifested God and can manifest God, or they can manifest everything on a transition vector towards manifested God, including all the wrong paths, pitfalls and illusions.

You see why I have a problem with Vedanta? It’s a simplified system that appears to give answers to all questions, but those answers are always useless poetry and outright wrong – for instance, how does karma actually work or what’s the actual difference between a pashavi and a yogi, and all you get are stories about forgetting one’s true nature and identifying with maya because your soul-mirror doesn’t reflect the One Moon correctly, and so on. Things *obviously* don’t work like that, and the more I was able to “see” the souls directly, the more I saw that the vedantic explanation of “karmic dirt” forming the difference between the souls is outright wrong, and that was before I was aware of the Buddhist explanation. The difference between a pashavi and a yogi isn’t that a pashavi is a yogi plus more karmic dirt, the difference is in orders of magnitude bigger and better organized karmic body. It’s like saying that a Commodore 64 is like a modern computer only impure, or that a frog brain is the same as human brain, only with more impurities. No. 🙂 A karmic body is not “impurities”, it’s, poetically speaking, the best you could do so far in trying to reach God in the relative existence. As you are more successful in reaching different aspects of God, your karmic body re-organizes, and your feeling of “self” remains “you”, and yet you perceive more and higher things as “you”, because regardless of how much your consciousness contracts or expands, “self” exists on the tiny kalapa-level, and the more kalapas you add to the soul-structure, they add dimensionality to the same core of identity, like those pinholes adding light to the same perceived entity. Sure, you can say it’s all an illusion or a paradox or whatever, but once we remove this world, which is “illusion proper”, I’m not really sure the word applies. Paradox, yes. But is the Relative illusion? I don’t think the word applies. It’s a paradox, yes, because that’s the word we have for things that exist in apparently contradictory or logically inconsistent ways. Yes, you can say that everything not-God is an illusion, but that would apply perfectly to this place, but in the astral world you would have the light of God shining through many things that retain distinction and individuality, and both distinction and individuality contribute to a complex story, so it would be quite difficult to find “not-God” there. So, the Vedantic story about the world being a mirage, a dream, an illusion, that works perfectly as an explanation for the vast difference in consciousness between samadhi and body-consciousness in this world, but it falls apart very quickly once you get past this world and you still want to know how things work.

Robin wrote:
The question is, is this desire for freedom and self realisation also part of the conditioning which awareness is also witnessing or is this desire actually originating from awareness itself as it tries to break the shackles of illusion and remember itself? The later would suggest that consciousness does have some influence in the relative world and is not solely a slave to the commands of the microprocessor. What do you think about it?

I think it’s a problem that is constrained to this world; I don’t see it anywhere else. Here, you have a very static and deterministic universe that still manages to interface with souls, and they are spliced between several modes of existence and reality-types, which creates both illusions and paradoxes. For instance, it’s a paradox that I can barely influence my physical body at all, in a sense that it degrades with age in ways that are completely beyond my control, and yet I can access realities way beyond all of that and use the body to write that down, and this is obviously an influence in the world, it’s obviously not something that naturally follows from the mechanics of the physical body. What follows from the mechanics of the body is that you develop caries spontaneously if you don’t brush your teeth with daily regularity; what follows from the mechanics of your body is that you get angry when someone annoys you. However, when you turn within and extend your consciousness, that’s when you access parts of you that are spliced off between worlds and here things start to be a paradox of this or that sort.

On desires, freedom and nature of the soul

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I’m reposting one of those private discussions that end up being too widely useful to be left private. 🙂

Robin wrote:
If free will is defined as freedom to do whatever we will/want and the options are so limited that we basically are not free to do anything then by that definition free will doesn’t really exist for anyone that is incarnated. One could argue that anyone with a physical body does not have free will which applies to incarnated enlightened souls too.

I’ve actually seen several definitions, or at least several ways of wiggling out of the paradox. One is that the desires are actually a problem, because if you have no desires, you are never in a situation to test your degree of freedom and find it lacking. I find this to be a dishonest solution. True, you can argue that in a God-state, you are in a state of total fulfillment, and if you define a desire-motivation exclusively as desire to move toward greater fulfillment, then this would be absent if total fulfillment is achieved. However, I find this model lacking. The first argument against it is that God is creative, which means that fulfillment can be motivated towards manifestation, or at least there is a phenomenon that can be explained in this manner, which would mean that emptiness of spirit is not the only possible motivation behind desire. Second, to lack desire is not necessarily a symptom of high achievement. I used to meditate under a tree on the graveyard and I got quite familiar with the way a tree exists and experiences, and desire plays no part in it. Nevertheless, I would suspect that a tree is not universally admired as having achieved the goal of existence. 🙂

So, I would say that true freedom is to have only the desires that are of God, meaning that they are of the kind that originates from God-consciousness and are of God-quality, meaning you are not bound by any lower force or a state that would condition your consciousness in ways that normally produce desires. Furthermore, this freedom from lower conditioning needs to be combined with the ability to manifest literally anything, so that your consciousness is not bound or limited by the inability to effect a desired outcome. Basically, what I’m talking about is complete purity of consciousness that is God-level of fulfillment and power, and is combined with unconditional omnipotence.

Robin wrote:
Perhaps a better way of framing the question is not weather or not we have free will but weather we have any control over anything at all and weather our apparent choices, preferences, likes/dislikes are all conditioned and therefore predictable. What I’m seeing is that choice is an illusion too and that there are just patterns of thoughts, emotions, sensations of certain qualities which are attracted to certain phenomena which resonate with their nature. However, this attraction isn’t really a choice any more that an electron doesn’t really choose to orbit around a proton but does so purely due to physical forces.

Well, this describes conditioned will and the correct conclusion is that this is not free will by any definition of freedom other than that by which a falling rock is free.

Robin wrote:
Similarly, one could say that a soul does not really choose God or the world, but when exposed to God light, the kalapas of ones spiritual body feel ‘attraction’ but I don’t think choice has anything to do with it, it’s the actual particles that are attracted. In contrast, a soul of poor quality may feel ‘repulsion’ to God which is again attributed to its own quality and nothing to do with choice either.

Yes, because one’s nature conditions his choices, which is probably why Ramakrishna said that one is free to choose the form in which to worship Krishna, because the implication is that you’re free only when worshipping Krishna in this or that form is the only thing you want to do, meaning that if other things are options to you, you are conditioned and not free. However, if you are truly free, you could do anything in theory, buy you don’t want to do anything outside a very narrow band of good options. Generally, I think freedom outside of God is greatly overvalued.

Robin wrote:
However, if we analyse this, I don’t have control over what sensations are experienced in this body, don’t have control over the emotions experienced at any moment, my mind pretty much does its own thing and pulls me in various directions and appears to have its own momentum, the interactions of all these sensations, feelings and thoughts with external objects is experienced as attraction and repulsion forces manifested as likes and dislikes all of which result in apparent choices which may not actually be choices and consciousness/awareness/spirit is simply the passive witness to the whole thing. If the spirit is deluded and identifies with the drama unfolding and thinks that it is the one making choices it is bound and if it understands the true nature of what’s going then perhaps it would be freed?

This is the paradox: if you’re conditioned, are you truly responsible for your actions? Vipassana helps in that regard, that much is certain.

I would say that in such a state of conditioned routine, you are not really yourself. Only when the shackles of human illusion are broken and you are in the state of darshan of God, do you truly start to remember yourself.

Robin wrote:
There are obvious problems with this theory such as if one cant influence or have control over anything then what’s the point of the entire creation?

If by “entire creation” you mean this shithole of a world, then I must state that there indeed is a point, but I cannot be forced to see it as a constructive one. However, the pit of doom is hardly the place to judge all creation by.

Robin wrote:
Regarding the topic of paying off karma, in the jewel you mentioned that it is karman that is reincarnated not atman. In that sense, atman is always the unchanging witness, is never incarnated, never subjected to karma. But who is “you” in the sentence “you need to pay off karma”?

For Vedanta, this is an unsolvable mystery, which is why I don’t see it as very useful in practice and have slowly abandoned it through the years. I prefer the Buddhist perspective according to which karma and the soul are the same thing, and instead of “working off karma” I would use the expression of “shaping oneself”, “purifying one’s consciousness”, or something similar. This is why Buddhism doesn’t really know what to do with the concept of atman, because it is by necessity a term that denotes a localized, karma-determined perspective of Brahman, and the very idea of attachment of atman (as defined by Vedanta) to karma is philosophically unsound. However, I do have an explanation that reconciles several apparent paradoxes. You see, if you understand brahman as the “hardware”, and everything else as “software”, then karma can behave fully according to the Buddhist expectations, and yet aggregations of karma can be seen as aspects of computer which localize the “selfness” nature of brahman. Basically, it’s a thing you can point your finger at and say, “here, the computer is doing something” showing an application window, and you can see many windows as independent and distinct, but what are they if not computer?

And yet, I am not fully satisfied with this explanation because aggregation of karma is more akin to the phenomenon described in Stanislaw Lem’s novel “Invincible”, or an imagined world where inherently computational superconductive crystals aggregate into larger structures and thus create more powerful computers. Basically, aggregation of karma intuitively feels more like grains of sand arranging themselves into a microprocessor than windows manifesting the computer, and yet both analogies are valid descriptions of the underlying phenomenon.

Principles

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I am quite amazed at the fact that the stuff that I write is almost always and universally seen as controversial, because the way I see it, it’s the common sense interpretation of the available fact pool. I’m not making stuff up, I’m not making low-probability leaps of faith and logic. The fact that I’m seen as controversial means you’re all smoking the wrong shit, I would say.

If anything, I would say that my ability to see what the facts actually are, and what follows from them is controversial only in the sense that everybody else lags behind because they have some kind of emotional or intellectual resistance to accepting the available facts; it’s not that I’m making wild guesses or working with fringe theories. I’m working with the same dataset everybody else can access. I’m not even that smart; if you IQ-test the statistical sample of some demanding science-based university, a percentage of students would match my raw cognitive power, or exceed it. So, if I’m not using an alternative dataset, and I don’t possess alien brainpower, how is it that I’m routinely ahead of the “main stream” to the point where people look at me as if I have two heads when I make a statement, and then months, years or decades later it’s “fuck, how did he know that”. It’s actually very simple. I don’t care what people think. I don’t care what they believe. I don’t care what they consider to be “main stream”. I don’t care if something will be accepted as true by others. I basically don’t care, I just take in the widest available pool of data, I do several attempts at normalizing the dataset (for instance, when thinking about bone shapes of hominid fossils, I ignore those obviously suffering from arthritis; when analysing the political picture, I eliminate obvious wishful thinking), and basically let the data speak to me with as little coloration as I can manage. I’m letting the raw data speak to me, so to say, and tell me about the world it lives in. Then I try to imagine the world the data lives in, and I try to predict stuff, and as I gather more data, I check whether it confirms or rejects my predictions, and so I iteratively refine my simulation until it fits all the available facts, and I allow for paradoxes; things don’t have to be neatly arranged and they don’t have to make sense. I don’t reject a Platipus just because it appears to make no sense. I don’t reject evidence of an extinction event just because it’s a one-off thing. I don’t reject the possibility of rare events just because they don’t happen in anyone’s living memory that introduces the kind of recency bias that allows people to build cities and farms in close proximity of active volcanos that just happened not to erupt in recent memory, or participate in economic bubble hysterias just because the last bubble-popping disaster was decades ago.

Basically, I’m doing science the way people used to do it, before it got so formal and rigid. I’m gathering data, using it to make a model, and then I test the predictive ability of the model with new data, and I either revise it or abandon it, depending on whether it works or not. And I don’t care whether it works or not; I don’t care about my reputation, or other people’s opinion, or about sunk investment in the existing model. I just want to find out how stuff works, and as far as my understanding improves, I don’t care whether I was right or wrong, as long as I get better understanding in the next iteration.

Let me demonstrate this with a few examples.

There used to be a controversy about whether the Neanderthals could speak, because in order to conclude that they could speak there should be a fossil finding that confirms both sufficient tongue mobility (hyoid bone) and brain capability (Broca’s region). My logic was that the common ancestor (Turkana boy) of both modern man and the Neanderthal man had a developed Broca’s region and this had to be present in the evolutionary successors, basically assuming that stuff that didn’t change much across the evolutionary tree was developed early on and then inherited in the perfected form. What follows from this logic is that speech was developed quite early on in the hominid evolutionary tree and it is actually the driving force behind the later brain development, because once you have speech, you can communicate complex ideas, and therefore more complex ideas can actually be an evolutionary advantage, and lack of complex ideas can be an evolutionary pressure. Basically, you can communicate complex things, such as storing food for the winter season, or migrating to where the salmon will be, or ambushing a herd of bisons in order to drive them off a cliff, or tell an educational story to the next generation in order to expand the level of inherited knowledge compared to the baseline of personal experience. Basically, my model of hominid brain development assumes that speech was developed quite early on, and that it created a positive feedback loop that both motivated and rewarded brain development.

Another example is the relationship between climate and the K-T extinction. I started by looking a graph of all known great extinctions in the history of life on Earth:

The shape of the graph surprised me, because I expected the mass extinctions to be independent, Poisson-distributed events, something akin to the background radiation. What I found useful is the ability to look at the graph and ignore all the scientific labelling that concentrates only on a few spikes, naming them the P-T extinction, K-T extinction etc. In fact, the extinctions follow a pattern of an elevated baseline of extinctions, followed by a spike, which means that some evolutionary pressure was in the environment for quite a bit of time, usually millions of years, and then either the pressures exceeded the survivability threshold for a huge number of species and caused a supermassive extinction all at once, or a discrete event aggravated the situation to the same effect. I also had to ignore human ways of perceiving time, because humans are a very short-lived species of even more short-lived beings, and our perception of time and change is inherently flawed. If something doesn’t change for 10 KY, we think it’s forever. If something stays the same for longer than our species has been around, we think it was designed in this perfect and static form by God. This is the motivation behind thinking of great extinctions in terms of discrete events – a supernova explosion, a giant asteroid strike, a supervolcanic eruption and so on. We don’t think in terms of continental drift that takes hundreds of millions of years to change the configuration of continents relative to sea currents, and when a radically fatal configuration is established, it takes 60-70 MY for the effect to manifest itself fully. We also don’t connect the events intuitively across such vast chasms of time, observing the long-term trends and ignoring the very visible spikes, but that’s exactly what I did with the data. I made an assumption that is opposite to every other analysis I’ve seen, and said “what if the spikes don’t actually matter?”, because the dinosaurs were in a process of mass extinction due to the slow process of reduction of global temperature, increased aridity and increase in seasonal climate variances. By “normalizing the data” I mean ignoring the biggest elephants in the room in order to see whatever is left when the distractions are removed, and then I saw that the climate has been cooling for more than 65MY, and a few MY ago it reached the point so extreme it started throwing the planet into ice ages, alternating between glacial and interglacial cycles, where the interesting fact is that it conforms to the Milankovich’s cycles, but only within Pleistocene, only after something cooled down so much it started throwing the climate off balance, and I decided that the amount of buffers in the atmosphere must have gone below the critical level, which allows for the extremes; most likely, the atmospheric CO2 was extracted into the oceans due to greater solubility of the gas in cold water, which put the climate into its death-throes, with the anticipated stable condition of a global glaciation that might last until the continental drift gradually changes the position of continents relative to the sea currents away from the current configuration that promotes cooling. My analysis is that the anthropogenic increase in CO2 emission actually helped stabilize the situation a bit, increasing the buffer levels to a more long-term sustainable value, but the long-term prognosis is unchanged. The problem with human thinking is that, due to our short life span, we assume that the Earth was perfect “the way we found it”, while in fact it was in a configuration that is fatal for life in the long-term, because of the cooling trend, and that we are in the last, terminal phase of this transition, and this terminal phase is called “Pleistocene”, the phase in which even the extremely small variances in orbital parameters can introduce an ice age, or pull the planet out of it. The next phase, I could call it Cryocene (in order not to repeat the “Cryogenian” label), would take place when the buffer levels in the atmosphere fall below the amount necessary for the orbital variances to thaw the planet out of the glacial phase, instead allowing for the progressive increase in glaciation until it reaches the “snowball Earth” phase again. How long until then? It’s hard to tell, but my intuitive interpretation of the graph says that the error of 5MY is acceptable. Translated to human language, the next ice age might be the one we never get out of, or we might have 5MY until that point, because the industrial CO2 emissions introduced so much unexpected buffer it’s hard to anticipate the consequences, to the point where it might delay the onset of the new ice age by several MY, or it might actually destabilize the system, create an unexpected Dansgaard-Oeschger event and pull us into an ice-age sooner. The margin of “I don’t know” is the size of 5MY, which is double the size of Pleistocene. One of the instability-modes that my model predicts is that the plants are normally restricted by the scarcity factors, such as CO2 or Phosphorus in the environment, and when you remove the restrictions, their growth suddenly expands exponentially to the point where they suck up and “bury” all those factors from the environment, basically turning atmospheric CO2 into coal deposits. This means that human-induced CO2 spike can produce a plant-induced CO2 drop which can, in some kind of a perfect storm of conditions, trigger a glaciation. However, the number of unknowns is so vast that my simulation has no predictive abilities within the stated margin of uncertainty. What is quite certain is that my model of a long-term cooling trend, driven by continental distribution that allows for a Coriolis-powered circumantarctic sea current, essentially “liquid cooling” the planet more efficiently than the Sun can warm it up, and promoting gradual buffer-extraction that destabilizes the global climate, is valid, and long-term predictive. The “problem” is that the process started more than 65MY ago, and that the Chicxulub asteroid produced a very visible extinction-spike that masked the actual problem. Or, we could say that human psychological attraction to discrete spikes is the actual problem. I think it has something to do with predatory genetics, where a lion or some other animal is perceived as a significant event, and grass growing is perceived as background noise that is ignored. Well, in my attempt to become less blinded by human biases, I started ignoring the lions and zebras and paying attention to the grass. This is why my analyses start by ignoring the things “everybody knows”, and going back to the raw data, normalizing it against distractions, and letting it tell its own story.

This article is too long already so I’ll stop here, although I could cite a dozen or so additional examples. In any case, you can see the outlines of my method – absorb the raw data, ignore biases and distractions, trust the known-to-be-valid mechanisms, such as thermodynamics, inertia and so on.

But, that’s also how I model politics – it’s not that much different. See who has better debt-to-GDP ratio, who has foreign trade sufficit, who has cheaper energy and more of it, who has better access to the basic natural resources, who is less sensitive to isolation from the global economic and political systems, who has more robust and reliable basic technological systems, and who has population that has a healthier attitude towards reality, and then model interactions and time-graphs. When you do that, not only do my assessments no longer look like some fringe conspiracy theory, but you start asking yourself why is nobody else following such common-sensical principles?

Good question, I guess.

Free will and desires

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I heard a saying once, attributed to Paramahamsa Ramakrishna: “Everybody has free will to choose the form in which they want to worship Krishna”, as an explanation of free will. I reduced this to the core statement, that free will exists only for God and the saints, because everybody else has so many conditions imposed upon them, it would be ridiculous to even speak of any kind of freedom of will. However, it is intuitive to people that they have this or that kind of freedom, and my parsing of Ramakrishna’s dictum is usually rejected on the intuitive level. Also, the concept of desire is very quickly introduced in any discussion about free will, so we’ll need to deal with that, as well.

I have a nasty joke from the former Yugoslavia as an illustration of the relationship between freedom and desire. The adapted version would go somewhat like this:

A guy was cornered by the street gang, and they asked him, do you want us to do it with or without lube? The guy thinks and answers, “with lube”. The gang leader shouts out: “Hey Lube, come over here, this faggot wants it bad”.

That’s the position we’re in, while in this world, and I remember this every time I hear some Hindu preacher start about how the desires need to be controlled because they somehow stand between ourselves and God. The guy cornered by a gang of sodomites actually has a hierarchy of desires; he wishes never to have found himself in that situation in the first place. Barring that, he wants to be out of there unharmed and instantly. Barring that, he would prefer to fight his way out of the situation, but there are too many of them and he assesses his chances and concludes that his options are to be either killed or beaten up first and then raped, and to be raped with varying degrees of bodily harm, and then appears to choose the option with the least harm.

That is what I call a conditioned desire, and all the desires we ever had in this world are likely of this kind, and when someone takes the last iteration of the process and claims that this thing is an actual desire, I think of that joke instantly, because one’s desire for a new car or a house or a new phone is exactly as free as that guy’s “desire” to be fucked with lube, and the Hindu or Buddhist preacher talking against desires is basically humiliating the victim of violence by claiming that “he wants it bad”.

Let me illustrate this with my own hierarchy of desires.

I want to be in God forever with no limitations of any kind, to either my consciousness, form of existence, memory, knowledge, power or freedom. I can’t have that, because reasons. OK, if I have to be here in this lunatic asylum / prison, can I have at least some of my stuff back so that I don’t have to feel like a bonsai kitten in every way possible? Nope, because reasons. [several iterations later] OK, I see where this is going, I’ll go buy a lawn mower to trim the grass on someone else’s lawn that I’m renting because I don’t have anything better to do anyway and I need a workout.

At this point the Hindu preacher pisses himself with happiness because he found the reason for all my problems: it’s the desire for a lawn mower that was preventing me from being with God all this time, and if I only gave it up and not act on it everything would be great, to which I roll my eyes and think “please kill me now”.

Basically, you’ll know what your desires actually are only as you start approaching the actual freedom. I would classify desires as intrinsic and extrinsic, where the intrinsic ones are the ones you would have in your pure, unlimited state, and for all I know, you might still want lube at that point, but I somehow don’t think so. The extrinsic ones come from the circumstances, and can be described as a desire for hell not to be as hot, or a desire for some toy so you don’t go crazy thinking about all the things you can’t do. Basically, the desire for sun block with protective factor of ten million ends as soon as you’re removed from hell.

Misc issues

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There are several issues I want to bring up.

Scott Ritter suddenly changed his narrative from “Ukraine is losing the war and no amount of help from the West can change that” to “Ukraine needs to hold on until the NATO trains their replacement army which is in the process right now, they just need to hold on until help arrives”. This honestly sounds like Hitler’s propaganda in 1945 – we need to hold on until the miracle weapons arrive and then we’ll revert all our losses and achieve final victory. Yeah right. Basically, I agree with Gonzalo Lira that the guy sounds as if someone gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse and he traded his reputation for mainstream acceptance. Someone from the CIA probably approached him and gave him a “are you with us or against us” offer. Basically, I would treat him as an outright CIA asset at this point.

As for the argument itself, it exists only within the Western disinformation thoughtspace; the idea that the purpose of Ukrainians is to keep dying, spending old Western weapons and laundering American freshly printed money in order to strategically weaken Russia is American idea and nobody with an independent thought in their head thinks that is a good plan, especially since the time-curve is that Russia is getting stronger and everybody else is about to have a crashing economy, mass starvation, fuel shortages and popular uprisings. Basically, it’s the Russians who have to keep the fire going and the West is going to end up in the post-Soviet 1990s. The most viable part of the Ukrainian army is being mopped up as we speak and there won’t be any of it left in the following weeks. After that, the Russians will deal with Kharkov and Odessa, probably offering them terms for surrender, because it would be either that or repeat Mariupol. What I actually expect to happen is an American intervention that would attempt to broaden the conflict significantly in order to complicate things for the Russians.

Another complication for the Russians is the fact that it might actually be immoral for them to perform tactical withdrawals from the territory they hold, because the Ukrops have shown a propensity for “cleaning up the traitors” at such areas, as shown in Bucha; basically, they execute all the civilians who in any way “collaborated with the enemy”.

Anything the Russians hold, they must hold perpetually in order to protect the populace from the Ukrainian fascists. This is not easily reconcilable with the requirement of having the least possible number of troops deployed. Also, they might soon have tens of thousands of prisoners of war, and those will be the real hardened Nazis like the ones from Mariupol, not the common soldiers whom they might interrogate and let go. It’s a serious logistical problem since they are unlikely to kill them outright, and they can’t really let them go either.

That insane thing about the American abortion law, and the instant pro-abortion protests everywhere looks very much like a psy-op, and a very weird one, because it looks as if some AI running simulations recommended introducing additional intra-societal conflict in order to keep the populace in a certain psychological state it deems desirable. The entire thing is very weird and looks very much as if someone were tweaking variables. Also, the story about the next virus out there, the monkey pox, looks actually counterproductive. I’m having a weirdness overload from some of the things I’m finding in Western press, and it goes further than just common war propaganda; it looks artificial, synthetic, like something that uses principles devised by human psychologists but turned into society-control widgets tweaked by computers. Basically, it looks like the smart humans created a complex AI system and filled it with data, the system is saying what needs to be tweaked, and then the orders are given to the moronic humans who work in the politics, NGOs and the press to create artificial issues or aggravate existing but unsolved ones. This might actually be very close to the root of the problem.

The financial system is in a state of flux preceding a major crash and is conforming to the predictions postulated by the “Dollar milkshake theory“. The cryptocurrencies showed that they are only an extension of the stock market’s high-volatility, high-risk asset pool and not a new financial system, they are as restrictive as the fiat currencies and have by all standards failed. The precious metals are behaving more-less according to expectations for the rising-dollar phase of the crash, and according to my feeling for these things, the last train for getting out of the financial bubble was the end of 2021; now it’s already late in the game because if you were in the stocks and crypto, you already suffered huge losses, and if you were in fiat currency, the metals are now more expensive but still a good idea to get in while they are still available in retail, which might not last long; also, in the later phases of the Dollar collapse when everybody attempts to get into gold, the prices will skyrocket in the Bitcoin-like manner, and availability will be severely curtailed, because the governments will suck up all the 400oz bars in attempts to shore up their currencies, which will make it hard for retail product manufacturers to make coins and smaller bars. If you have confidence in “cloud gold”, basically “gold in someone else’s safe”, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening to those who held gold “in the cloud”. America and the UK will outright confiscate other countries’ gold, and countries will outright confiscate private citizens’ gold with some lame excuse.

So, the US Dollar will be the last of the Western currencies to go down the drain, but I would recommend against going into the Dollar to save yourself, despite the fact that it might look very profitable in the short term, because it might be hard/impossible to get out of it, and you’ll end up with lots of numbers on the screen, unless you’re incredibly lucky and play it exceedingly well, and ride the wave of the “Dollar milkshake” by first going from other fiat currencies to the Dollar, exploit the growth of Dollar, and then manage to get out of it and into physical assets while they are relatively undervalued. However, I think it might not introduce benefits compared to what you would obtain by going straight into physical assets immediately, but it does contain significant additional risks, such as timing the things wrongly and being unable to get out, or only being able to purchase gold at exorbitant prices and incurring huge losses. I stand by my old recommendation of keeping only as much fiat currency as you need for monthly liquidity, and putting everything else into precious metals, and staging it in both physical and “cloud” storage so that you retain the flexibility of remotely allocated gold/silver for liquidity purposes.