Monthly Archives: November 2016

Trump for president, Hillary for prison

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So, as was completely expected based on the (actual, not propagandistic and fabricated) polls, Donald Trump won the US presidency. In fact, judging on the numbers, there was some significant vote fraud involved in favour of Clinton, because she didn’t lose with the margin that I expected. However, those who did the stealing either miscalculated and didn’t steal enough, or they stole as much as they could and it still wasn’t enough to make a difference. In any case, Darth Hillaria’s faith in the dark side of the Force was misguided.

I must admit that this defeat of the arguably worst person in the world really pleases me, especially since all the lying media and all the pompous, self-righteous communist assholes were cheering for her.

However. The corruption that she represents is still in place. All the Satan-worshipping crazies that financed her, that worked for her in the media, they are still there. They still write the news. The colleges are still controlled by the special snowflakes who are terrified by opinions but who love to use violence. Everything is infiltrated by the Muslims, both through financing and through access to the leftist infrastructure. Economy is still in exactly the same condition, and its collapse has been delayed only by the most desperate of measures. The global situation is still the same. Almost half of America’s voters are stupid enough, indoctrinated enough or just evil enough to have voted for Hillary Clinton. Those people are supposed to participate in the recovery of America? I don’t think so. The communist left is a huge Trojan horse embedded in the tissue of the West, and it will continue to function like cancer of some kind, working diligently on the destruction of both its host and itself.

Trump is competent, but I don’t think he’s actually aware of what a pile of shit he inherited. Also, it remains to be seen if he can put enough of his men in charge to make a difference, or if he will be hindered and obstructed by the pro-Muslim leftist aparatchiks who were put into strategic places in the post-Bush era. And even if he does everything right, it remains to be seen if his vision of a great America will be acceptable to other great nations, who have no wish to live in anyone’s shadow, and who will accept nothing less than partnership.

But he might not get to be sworn in at all. In the interregnum, Obama still has the time to cook up a world war, since the Russian forces will now strike at the terrorists in Syria, and if the Americans jump in to protect them, shit will instantly hit the fan. Also, Saudi Arabia looks like it’s about to go full retard, with all the predictable consequences.

So yeah, I am glad Trump won, but I am skeptical regarding the amount of difference it can make in the long run, because the evil of communism has infiltrated the academia, the media, entertainment and basically all spheres of public life, that influence the opinions of the masses. The people in general proved to be fed up with them enough to elect Trump and to give more credence to Alex Jones than to CNN. However, the leftists are very good at causing damage and at stimulating the lowest impulses in people. Trump is an expert in making a deal, but I don’t think this will suffice. He will also need to clean house, and heads will have to roll.

WTF?

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I’m still scratching my head after having read this:

U.S. military hackers have penetrated Russia’s electric grid, telecommunications networks and the Kremlin’s command systems, making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the U.S. deem it necessary, according to a senior intelligence official and top-secret documents reviewed by NBC News.

Essentially, the Americans just stated that they had committed an act of war against Russia. Sure enough, the Russians are asking them if they heard it well:

Russia expects Washington to provide an explanation after a report claimed that Pentagon cyber-offensive specialists have hacked into Russia’s power grids, telecommunications networks, and the Kremlin’s command systems for a possible sabotage.

One possible explanation is that’s all for domestic consumption, both the allegations that the Russians are interfering with their elections and the assurances that they have a response ready. Both claims might be completely false.

However. What the actual fuck? If they actually have something implanted in the Russian infrastructure, good fucking job telling the Russians so that they can fix it. But having in mind what a bad idea that would be, it probably means it’s all a bluff and they don’t have anything, in which case a) their ever declining credibility just hit rock bottom and b) the Russians were told that they are now fully justified in taking countermeasures against America.

So yeah. Those people have just enough more brain cells than chickens so that they don’t shit on the lawn uncontrollably.

Elections, and why they don’t matter

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In a democracy, you basically elect a candidate who has enough of a stakeholder vote to implement a policy. If, by cheating or some other means, a candidate is elected who cannot sway stakeholders sufficiently to implement a policy, you end up with a lame duck president who can’t get anything done. Obama is a good example of that. He is a demagogue and an ideologue who isn’t skilled in the politics of making a deal and getting things done.

So, basically, if you elect a candidate who will stay the course, the general trends in politics and economy dictate the course. If you elect a disruptive candidate, the general trends in politics and economy dictate the course, in the sense that a disruptive president doesn’t have enough power do change anything significant.

That’s why I’m skeptical of all those who believe that Trump winning the American elections can change anything significant. He might have the best of intentions, and is in fact the better of two candidates, but he can’t change anything because the reason behind the current global situation are systemic trends of the kind that cannot be influenced by a president, for better or for worse.

Yes, Hillary is a pro-war candidate, and Trump is a pro-America candidate. Hillary is a crazy person who will yell and threaten at Putin and anyone else, would implement a hardline policy and would cause a nuclear war after a few moves. Trump would want to re-assert American supremacy, and the Russians and the Chinese will say “no thank you, we have this now”. He will then slam his metaphorical fist on the table and play chicken with them, because he would expect them to back down. They will not, and there will be a nuclear war in a few moves. The thing is, Hillary is so pissed at Putin because she already tried to bribe him, to intimidate him and to make him back down, and it didn’t work. Trump is yet to get there, but the result would be the same. The Russians don’t want to be slaves who are ordered around, and the Chinese don’t want to be the manufacturing colony of the West.

Trump also naively thinks he can bring back the jobs that were outsourced abroad. Those jobs were outsourced because in America labor is too expensive, and it’s systemically expensive, because the inherent costs are greater in the USA than anywhere else in the world. This means housing, food, basic expenses, education and health. This in turn dictates the behavior of the labor unions, who press for higher wages. If you reduce the wages below a certain point, you reduce the purchasing power of your population and essentially lose them as a market for your expensive products, essentially pricing your population out of the market. Considering how the American population has the greatest purchasing power in the world, that’s not good. Also, considering how the second greatest purchasing power in the world, the Chinese middle class, is basically uninterested in American overpriced and often underperforming products, it’s not something that can easily be changed by some political maneuvering.

The main reason why America was great is that Europe was torn down by two world wars, and they had an influx of the most competent immigration in the world. They also got industrialized by the war effort, and after that they implemented a lever in the world’s financial system, where US Dollar was the world reserve currency, controlled most of the world’s gold, and was the OPEC trading currency, where anyone who wanted to buy oil first had to buy dollars on the currency market, making it possible for America to print enormous amounts of unbacked money, and everyone had to purchase that Mickey Mouse currency with actual hard assets, or the American aircraft carriers would get parked close to their shores and reduce their country to rubble. Also, they abused other supposedly international systems in such a way as to strongly motivate their own economy while imposing various hindrances and pressures to non-American economies. An example of that is cheap FED money for the venture capital investors, who could pump enormous sums in all kinds of American technology startups, both boosting the American GDP and their technological competitive advantages. So, those are the reasons why America was “great”. It’s not the constitution, it’s not democracy and it certainly isn’t freedom. It’s the combination of military force, control of the world’s financial system and some very lucky historical and geographic circumstances, such as being essentially on an island separated from potential adversaries by oceans on both sides.

The trend is that the time of America’s dominance is over. Also, the trend is that America will not yield its dominant position peacefully. Also, the other forces aren’t willing to put up with American pressures, manipulations and abuses much longer, if at all. Since America still has a military advantage over them, it is likely to try to use that advantage while it is still there. So, America thinks it will win in war and lose in peace. You tell me what is going to be the end result.

The role of intellect in spirituality (translation)

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(I received a request for translation of one of my older articles in Croatian, so here goes.)

What makes logical sense to the human mind does not therefore necessarily have much to do with reality. This is the reason why the overly intellectual systems, such as the medieval scholastics, that were based on the authority of logic and reason, historically fared rather poorly. Those systems, however, that placed intellect second, and observation of facts first, such as the modern science, gave much better results in practice.

One could now say that science is an extremely intellectual discipline. That is true, but it is only secondarily intellectual, and primarily factual, observational and perceptional. If observations contradict an intellectual construct, the intellectual construct will be discarded. In a scholastic, neoplatonic system the facts could contradict a theory all they want and it would still remain standing, simply because its adherents could say that their intellectual construct is founded in the world of ideas and as such superior to the imperfect, transitory and limited matter, which due to its deficiencies fails to meet the requirements of perfection set by their theory.

The human mind is, therefore, a weak instrument of cognition, and unless we keep it in check by a contact with reality, it will be capable of forming utterly ungrounded ideas that can exist in contradiction to facts and can be accepted without positive evidence of any kind, without any kind of correctional feedback. If we observe the history of human thought, which can be more truthfully called the history of human folly and nonsense intermixed with occasional sparks of lucidity, it becomes clear that the only way for us to avoid the pitfalls of navel-gazing madness, is to stick to the specific, to that which has foundations in experience and observation. To disregard observation because it doesn’t fit our theories is a common sign of psychotic behavior, to which few are immune, including science. The example of that is ignoring the transcendental experiences, which simply do not exist for science – they are either ignored, or attributed to delusion, hallucination or deception. Essentially, the witnesses are not trusted, in the same way in which Lavoisier didn’t trust the eyewitnesses of meteoric impacts. The lesson is that the ego-stimulation, caused by the sense of having it all figured out, and having the intellectual comprehension of the totality of all existence, is such a seductive and powerful drug, that it is capable of turning the otherwise reasonable people into fanatical cultists capable of ignoring absolutely anything that threatens their drug supply. What makes science, at least in theory, superior to the alternatives, is intellectual honesty, due to which a pet theory will be discarded if it is contradicted by the facts. At the point where science starts ignoring the facts, it ceases to be science.

In what way is all of that relevant to spiritual practice? Well, it is my personal opinion that there is no significant difference between physics and spirituality, other than the obvious fact that they are dealing with different kinds of subject matter, and vectors having a scalar component that isn’t kinetic, thermal etc., but emotional, karmic etc. All the basic principles, such as the law of conservation of energy and momentum, equivalence of action and reaction and all similar geometric laws therefore apply to both, they just need to be adapted to meet the specifics of the field of study, and we then get something that could be called the law of conservation of overall spiritual energy, or karmic momentum. Likewise, similar problems remain due to excessive fondness for a particular worldview and aversion to its dismissal when it is contradicted by the facts. The greatest difference is in the fact that in spirituality, human consciousness is in fact the laboratory in which the experiments are performed, and predictions are either confirmed or falsified. That is where the aspects of reality are perceived and interpreted.

If the fondness for delusion and errors of all kinds persists in physics, which is based on objective sensory measurements, it is significantly more so the case with spirituality, where everything takes place within the mind, which makes the concept of completely neutral sensory instrument and measurements impossible. This makes the situation so difficult it is really hard to find people who would indeed approach spirituality in a way that could be considered scientific. However, it is not only possible, but is a direction I think is necessary if the true advancements are to be made. For if the follies such as alchemy and astrology didn’t produce good results in physics, they will fail in a similar way in spirituality, and we should instead choose to rely on principles and methods that produced better results.

Now we get to the point where spiritual practice must part ways with the customary methodology of science, which tends to be cold and distanced. For if we are to use the spiritual states as a laboratory in which experiments are to be made, it means we must at the same time calmly observe the events, and at the same time be completely involved in some, often extremely intense spiritual state, such as ecstasy, love, sorrow, happiness or suffering. Likewise, due to the specifics of the human mind, the things that will yield results can often be the direct opposite to anything one would recognize as scientific. For instance, a state of elation produced by listening to music or reading literature will almost certainly produce some kind of spiritual experience, while cold analytics will rather suppress the latent spiritual potentials. The part of consciousness that is useful for analysis and interpretation of an experience, therefore, lies in direct opposition to the part of consciousness that is useful for actually attaining a spiritual experience. This apparent incongruence is the cause of a great divide between qualifications necessary for a mystical practice, and qualifications necessary for the correct intellectual formulation of the practice and its results. Consequently, the spiritual practitioners are often to be found among the intellectually incoherent persons, while the intellectually coherent ones are hindered in attaining spiritual experiences by their very coherent and disciplined mental structure, and are therefore limited to having an opinion about the spiritual experiences of others. I would say that I am a huge exception in this regard, perhaps due to my specific approach to mind, which I treat as a tool or an instrument of a sort, that needs to be maintained in order to be useful for correct formulation and expression of ideas, but I don’t actually use it as an instrument of cognition, in a way similar to that in which a military radar installation doesn’t use a computer for getting information about the size, position and direction of the aircrafts – for that, it uses the radar. The computer receives the information detected by the radar, and proceeds to analyze and display the information in a symbolic, coherent form.

It is exactly due to the frequent intellectual incoherence of the spiritual practitioners that we have to deal with the deluge of false-positives, where incoherent persons posture as spiritual practitioners, without any factual backing. I met my share of those, and I’m afraid it would serve no useful purpose to indulge in lengthy analyses that would aim to discern them from the authentic phenomena. I use my “nose” for discernments of that kind – if it stinks, don’t eat it. If a person emanates a “stench” of spiritual rot and decay, all the while rambling about his high spiritual achievements, run the other way. The criterion of fruits, as established by Jesus, is quite applicable: if a tree produces acorns, it is definitely not a fig tree, or, as the Romans would nicely put it, “Sed nemo potuit tangere: merda fuit”[1]. However, with a similar analogy, I tend to avoid eating blackberries from a bush that is placed at just the right height for a passing dog to piss on – or, in other words, I avoid the good spiritual fruits that have been intellectually processed in such a way that the overall result is inedible. The example of this are the authentic mystics who have moulded their experiences in the context of their own religion, which by itself is more of a spiritual pitfall than a path, and it is better to take the entire thing with a grain of salt, rather than to risk accepting it all without reservations and ending up in some pathological following.

One will ask how is it possible for deranged and clinically stupid people to have authentic spiritual experiences. I would say that one of the possible causes lies in the instability of their minds, which makes it rather malleable and prone to all kinds of influences, ranging from authentic spiritual experiences to various mental disorders. This doesn’t make the experience itself less valid, but it can be mixed together with other phenomena, often so problematic that the overall result is rendered useless. Likewise, mental rigidity can be a powerful inhibitor of spiritual experience, which requires a great deal of spiritual flexibility, or deviation from the mental paths most commonly traveled. If one’s inhibitions reman active at all times, they will correct all deviations and thus effectively roast all possible seeds of spiritual experience. On the other hand, if such inhibitions are completely absent, the mind can simply disintegrate into madness due to the enormous number and strength of various deviations. In my opinion, the useful approach is to keep the mind active and useful when necessary, but to allow it to get out of the way of the spiritual states that are incompatible with its very nature. It’s like sex: you need the mind in order not to end up in bed with the wrong person, but when you are in bed with the right person, you can safely turn it off and enjoy the experience. The question is therefore not whether you need the mind or not, but where do you need it and in what way, and when you don’t need it, it is to be set aside. It is similar to the way in which a soldier wishes to have the best possible rifle, one that will always accurately hit and kill the enemy, that will never jam and for which ammunition is abundant, but he doesn’t carry it around with him all the time, but only when necessary.

[1] Martial 3.17: “But none could touch it: it was shit”.