A question arises of what does this world look like to the angels and holy souls above, in the real world?
Well, the answer is quite simple. You know that prologue, John 1:5 from the Bible?
“The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
“The Darkness”. That’s what this world is, and that is how it is known.
I think it’s one of those simple questions that have very complex answers. The religions of course claim God did, but I find this to be a lazy answer that produces more problems later on, when one tries to explain features of this world that are inconsistent with something a good God would conceivably create. Sure, it’s a philosophically elegant answer, and in a sense it is actually true – because God is the actual “hardware” this world runs on. If you touch this world deeply enough to reach beyond it, you find God. As you do, you find out that this world is nothing but a very thin veil of illusion, that paradoxically both does and doesn’t exist, at the same time. It doesn’t exist as what it purports to be, and yet it does exist as it can be perceived. So, when you scrape away the illusion of the world, the reality that is revealed beneath it is that of God.
However final this revelation seems to be, I later discovered there to be more to it. You see, at one point I found out that Sanat Kumar actually “owns” this world and seems to have designed it outright, which was quite shocking since he also turned out to be the actual person behind the aliases of Satan and Mara, in Christianity and Buddhism respectively. What was shocking to me is not the possibility that Satan designed this world, because any insight into the nature of this world would make this quite believable; however, the technical skill behind it seemed so great, and so inconsistent with what I knew of Sanat Kumar and his abilities, that I felt genuine fear, because if he’s so skilled and powerful as to do that, we must all be doomed.
Later, it was revealed that the answer is much more complex, and much less frightening. You see, God apparently created the real world, the one He would design, but for some reason it was brought up that the souls might wish to explore their creativity by making something different, and so God created an artifact I call The Jewel. I don’t actually know what it is – it feels like a normal spiritual artifact, but also like an abstraction layer, a conscious being with God’s creative power but without a will of its own – and yet not quite, as I found out. Basically, it has to execute orders of an authorized person, but he has opinions and will voice them quite clearly if he doesn’t like what you’re doing. The Christians would call him some kind of an Angel, but I don’t think that would be true, because it attempts to reduce reality into something that no longer rings true.
Of course, when God created this, it became obvious that serious problems might arise if someone used The Jewel to create something inappropriate, so someone was given the task of evaluating and authorizing all requests for use. That person, whom I internally call the Sentinel, felt more like what the Christians would imagine an Angel to feel like. No wings though, but old, wise and in service of God.
Here we encounter Sanat Kumar. The biblical story about Satan gets it completely wrong. He’s not the greatest of God’s angels; far from it. He actually feels like an inferior kind of spiritual being that looked at those above him with envy and all kinds of anger, jealousy and spite, and in his mind invented all kinds of philosophy to elevate himself and denigrate those above him – I think he was the original egalitarian, thinking that everybody should be equal in God, and not as they were in reality, where some were enormously great, while those like himself despaired as they beheld them from below. What particularly annoyed him was the fact he perceived, that those great souls he envied all seemed to bask in God’s presence and draw their power and greatness therefrom, and the thought formed in his mind: if not for the ubiquitous presence of God from which they derive their power, they would all be just like him, and if all were reduced to the same, fair playing ground, where they could not reach for God whenever they need an answer to any question or power to achieve any goal, what would they do then? And from this thought, he apparently started to form a plan, but since he himself was a being of lesser order, he lacked the power and the means to bring it to fruition. However, there happened to be just the thing he needed, and so he approached the Sentinel and asked for permission to use The Jewel to create a new world, that would equalize the playing ground between the souls, and show which ones would truly choose God when God were not obvious and ubiquitous, and in fact reality seemed to contradict and obscure it; will they still find a source of light to shine and be great, or will they be revealed as frauds, who seem to shine only when there’s abundant light around them? Will they shine in darkness as well?
The Sentinel turned his piercing insight onto Sanat Kumar, and saw his envy, jealousy, malice, hatred, and desire to be perceived as more than his actual stature, which was defined by the lowly emotions he seemed unwilling to renounce. Sanat Kumar felt that the Sentinel beheld him with pity and saw him as lowly and flawed, and his anger flared. However, the Sentinel knew that God’s plan in creating The Jewel was to allow exactly this lowly kind of beings to explore creative options in order to see why God’s original creation was in fact optimal, and why it was the way it was, and you can’t do that unless you play with “what ifs”, make something different and see why it’s not good. So, he understood that the implicit premise of it all was to allow creation of inferior worlds, by inferior minds, because a superior mind would instantly prune the tree of options, see why most of them are bad, and be left with what God originally created, and praise Him for His genius.
Pondering this, the Sentinel was inclined to approve the request, but with certain limitations. He would make the experiment temporary, because Sanat Kumar looked like someone who would create something nasty and very much opposed to God’s plans, so precautions absolutely had to be put in place. Also, everybody who was to participate had to do so willingly. Sanat Kumar also had his stipulations. He wanted to prohibit God from interfering – basically, if God wanted to do something in his world, he would have to play by his rules, if not to completely invalidate the experiment. Essentially, God was free to offer himself as an option for souls to choose, but this option could not be presented in such a way as to overwhelm and be perceived as the only possible or rational choice. Also, if the experiment is to be limited to a certain time, this time is to be kept secret.
As they almost agreed to the terms, another being appeared and addressed the Sentinel, warning him of Sanat Kumar and his designs. There were no precedents to draw experience from, but he felt great danger from this entire thing, and urged the Sentinel to reject it outright, mostly on the general principle that all that is good is derived from God, and blocking and inhibiting God’s presence, glory and power will produce outcomes that are the opposite of good, but since dark evil of the kind we later came to know never existed in the history of God’s creation up to that point, his argument was perceived as abstract and intangible, and the Sentinel basically told him to have more faith in God, because God is so great He can overcome anything. His mind was also preoccupied with something else, that he perceived as more spiritually rewarding and important than this seemingly marginal affair in which the glory of God was obscured, so he dismissed that other being’s concerns and approved Sanat Kumar’s plan and gave him limited permissions to command The Jewel to that effect.
I wish I could say that something dramatic happened, like the heavens darkening and the voice of God ominously thundering “What have you done?!?”, but I remember merely moving away with a premonition of grave impending doom.
As more and more souls got entangled into this terrible mess of a world, people started to perceive a problem, and here we come to the third creator of this world. It’s you.
You see, the world consists of three major elements. The first is the creative power of God, invoked by The Jewel. The second is the design of Sanat Kumar, limited by the terms imposed by the Sentinel, who by the way doesn’t exist anymore because he seems to have been crushed by the gravity and consequences of his sin of omission and a grave lapse in his duties, which were to prevent this exact thing from ever happening. The third major element of this world is the energy invested by the souls that come to incarnate here, and this energy powers up all kinds of traps and attractors, making it more appealing, harder to resist, and worse, the way all traps are made worse by things that make them appear more beautiful and appealing. If this place looked as nasty from the other side as it is experienced by those unfortunate enough to be trapped in it, hardly anyone would ever come here. However, fools seem to be easily convinced by either an appeal to their vanity, thinking they will succeed where countless others have failed, by a promise of spiritual evolution better and faster than what is possible in heaven, or, in case of the worst ones, by a promise of fulfillment of all kinds of desires that can’t be fulfilled in heaven, because they require limitation and absence of God. Some are even attracted by compassion, hoping to be able to rescue those previously trapped. All those attractors are powered by the energy invested by the trapped souls, who project their dreams and hopes in this place as it devours them and drinks their life away, turning it into bait for the next generation of fools.
So, to answer the initial question, this world was created by God, Satan and you.
I started writing about something in the comment section, but I decided it’s relevant enough to make it an article.
The CrowdStrike event looks like a very mild example of something I’ve been worrying about for years, namely a widespread systemic persistent IT outage that puts payment systems worldwide out of commission.
Basically, everybody is using digital payment for everything these days, so what happens if it all goes out for some reason? Oh, you’ll use cash. You mean, the ATM is going to work? No it isn’t. You mean, you have cash and will just use it? You mean, the cash register computer will not be afflicted, and the cashier will be willing to take your money without the ability to print out the invoice and register the transaction? Or will all the stores close until this is dealt with? In which case you will have to rely on whatever food and hygienic/medical supplies you have at your place, because you’ve been prepping? Oh wait, you’ve been prepping but since nothing happened you just consumed all the stuff and there isn’t any now? Yeah, that.
I mean, the first level of preparing for an IT outage is to have an air-gapped spare laptop stashed in some drawer, with Linux/Windows dual boot in case one of those two is the cause of failure, but the next question is, what do you connect to, if the cause of the problem is general, so the telecoms are down, banks are down, online services are down, AWS/Azure can’t process your credit card so it locks you out of your servers, GoDaddy is down so you can’t transfer your domains somewhere out of the afflicted area, or DNS is down so you can’t reach anything, or the satellites are down so Starlink doesn’t work. And let’s say it’s something really major so the consequences take so long to clear, there’s serious breakdown of services everywhere.
The first answer everybody has to this is something along the lines of “it’s unlikely that all the computer systems will go out at once”. True, it’s unlikely, but it was also previously unseen that all the enterprise win10 machines go out at once and half the world gets instantly paralyzed. Those machines aren’t independent. Microsoft enforces push updates, and the big corporations have unified IT policies which means they all enforce updates to all their machines. Also, everybody seems to run Windows, which means it’s no longer necessary for an attack vector or a blunder to target billions of computers independently, because it’s a single failure that can propagate from a single point and instantly take down enough of the network that the rest have nothing to connect to.
Also, there have recently been revelations that OpenSSL had severe vulnerabilities. The vast majority of Internet infrastructure uses OpenSSL. A systemic vulnerability that can be targeted everywhere means… you tell me.
Someone will say that people would adapt, and my answer is, what does that even mean? Every single store I’ve been in for the last decade or so uses bar-code readers to scan items, and then the computer pulls out the item data, most notably the price, from the database, so that the cashier can charge you. More recently, all those computers are required to connect to the state tax service where every bill needs to be “fiscalised” for taxation purposes. If Internet fails, the cash register can’t “fiscalise” bills and that’s going to be a problem. If the cash register is out because it’s always a Windows machine and you saw what can happen to those, and it’s connected to the Internet or the “fiscalisation” won’t work, the cashier won’t be able to tell how much the item you want to purchase costs and thus won’t be able to charge you. They don’t have prices on items anymore, like they did in the ‘80s. Everything is in the database.
Some say, run Linux, or buy a Mac. Great, but it doesn’t actually solve anything, because if every Enterprise and most smaller companies run everything on Windows, and those computers all bluescreen, what are you going to connect to, with your Linux PC? How does your computer even matter if you go to a store and you can’t buy anything, and how does it matter if you try to go online and most of everything is down, because OpenSSL has been attacked by something that gets root permissions on your computer and encrypts its filesystem?
I’ve been recently thinking that Internet isn’t so much a framework for connecting computers, but really a separate plane of existence. When I’m using my computer, I’m not really on an island in Croatia, I’m on the Internet. Imagine all the beings that exist in the physical world, but without an Internet connection, like trees, birds, cats and so on. In order to interact with them or even perceive them, you need to switch planes of existence, between physical world and the Internet. However, some aspects of the physical world, like our civilization for instance, have been abstracted into the Internet to such a degree that you can’t even use them anymore if you don’t have access to all kinds of Internet-based infrastructure, which is not currently perceived as a problem, but might become one really fast if something fundamental breaks down with the Internet.
Also, if a nefarious government or a corporation wants to lock you out of the Internet for “non-compliance”, you are really fucked, which makes it a really big sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, forcing everybody to be good and obedient slaves.
Yesterday, a billion computers running Windows 10 bluescreened because Microsoft pushed an untested update by a company called CrowdStrike. Air travel, banks, payment systems, hospitals and who knows what else was affected. Interestingly, everybody affected belonged to a single user group: large entities with enterprise-level security systems installed.
The guy who tried to assassinate Trump once appeared in a 2022 Blackrock ad. I tried to test several possible conspiracy theories, and nothing really makes sense. The guy seems to be a stupid kid, but without any social network accounts, which is weird, because if that stuff was wiped in advance, that would be evidence of an actual conspiracy on very high levels that include intelligence agencies. Also, the guy was on a roof in what was supposed to be a protected area, and the experts say the only explanations are total incompetence or conspiracy.
So, we have two major events very close to each other, where almost inexplicable levels of incompetence are the only alternative explanation to conspiracy. So, let’s first go with the more parsimonic explanation: incompetence. This is actually very easy to believe, because America is literally rotting from top to bottom, and incompetence is absolutely widespread, and often dressed up in corporate and political newspeak to look good. Boeing literally can’t make airplanes anymore because they fired all their engineers. Microsoft no longer has a department that tests software, they basically fired it all and are now crowdsourcing product testing. Big startups that turn out to be based on outright fraud – basically just hype without a product – are no longer even news, it’s the way things are done there. The Secret Service head is a woke woman that has a goal of “diversity”, and Trump’s security detail included several obviously incompetent women who were running around aimlessly like headless chicken. The president of America is completely senile. Meritocracy is a bad word there, because it goes contrary to all the DEI neo-Marxist nonsense that’s the ruling policy of the country. No, incompetence cannot be ruled out as an explanation for anything there, because the entire West is a black hole of incompetence, idiocy and all sorts of fools who would save the world and CrowdStrike is an excellent metaphor: a security firm that created the greatest security threat and outage in history.
However, as tempting it is to say that Americans are obviously idiots and no level of incompetence can be put past them, I would still like to explore conspiracy as an explanation, just to be thorough. The problem here is that there’s no actual evidence, but if I was told that incompetence has to be ruled out as an explanation and that I have to promote the secondary explanation, no matter how poorly backed by evidence, to the no1 spot, I’d say that the circumstantial non-evidence points in the direction of someone trying to create chaos, or at least test the mechanisms they have in place for creating chaos, panic and erosion of normalcy. It would have to be someone in a high enough place to be able to control both Secret Service, Microsoft and whoever in the Wall St. billionaire crowd it is that owns big enough chunk of CrowdStrike, which seems to be a 80 billion company that sells security-themed nonsense to enterprise customers, who all wet their panties at the mention of security and control. If it’s AI controlling security, they are already working very hard to suppress a loud orgasm in public. CrowdStrike seems to sell just the right combination of buzzwords, but in reality, I have no reason to believe it’s not the new Theranos. I also have no reason to believe that it is. However, knowing how American business works, … In any case, the most likely explanation would be a conspiracy from those WEF people, or whoever sells them ideology and panders to their narcissism in order to control them. It’s actually possible that they take instructions from an AI, which for instance tells them that they need increased social anxiety in order to increase probability of success for whatever grand plan they are implementing, and they pulled the strings for several chaos-sowing events.
I don’t know. However plausible this sounds, the evidence is incredibly thin and I can’t give it a Bayesian match higher than 20%; incompetence is just so much more elegant explanation, but for some reason I’m not happy with it, because the other explanation fits into a wider situation very nicely, and once the news about the Trump assassination attempt started to circulate, the thing that crossed my mind was “whoever put this in motion must have a plan B”. Also, yes, Biden is completely senile, but someone is pulling the strings of that obvious puppet, and it’s in someone’s interest to have a figurehead “President” who gives them free rein. That someone might not want there to be an election. Furthermore, the two explanations are not mutually exclusive, as a society riddled with profound and systemic incompetence is very easily influenced or outright taken over by malicious actors. I would therefore advise caution, and expect major disruptive events. Declaration of a state of emergency in America, resulting in closing the borders (for departures at least), lockdown and severe crackdown on what little there remains of freedom is likely in the short-term. I don’t know what excuse they will use this time, but something’s definitely in the air.
Regarding the Intel CPU issues, I must say I expected that; I couldn’t tell which manufacturer will have the issue first, but with the arms race of who’ll be the first to make the 0 nm node dye that draws a megawatt of power and needs to be cooled with liquid Helium, it’s a perfectly logical outcome. If I had to guess, I’d say they made transistors out of too little material at some critical part of the dye, and with thermal migration within the material at operational temperatures the transistors basically stopped working properly.
So, basically, the real question is who actually needs a CPU of that power on a single-CPU client machine? We’re talking 24 cores, 32 threads, 5.8 GHz boost clock, 219W max. power at full turbo boost. This is sheer insanity, and it’s obvious that my ridiculous exaggeration about megawatts of power isn’t even that much more ridiculous than the actual specs of that thing. So, who even needs that? I certainly don’t. Gamers? They probably think they do, and they are likely the ones buying it. Developers? Video renderers? Graphics designers? I don’t know. But putting that many cores on one CPU, and clocking them this high, is sheer madness reminiscing of the Pentium IV era, where they clocked them so high, and with such dye layout, that a piece of malware appeared that deliberately iterated along the central path until it overheated so much the dye cracked, destroying the CPU.
I’m writing this on a Mac Studio M2 Max, which has more power than I realistically need, even for Lightroom, which is extremely demanding, and it’s idling at 38°C during the summer. It never makes a sound, it never overheats, and it’s absolutely and perfectly stable. I actually had the option of getting the model with twice the power for twice the money, which is an excellent deal, and I didn’t bother, because why would I? At some point, more power becomes a pointless exercise in dick-measuring. Sure, bigger is better, but is it, when it’s already half a meter long and as thick as a fire extinguisher? So this is the obvious consequence – Intel tried to win a dick measuring contest with AMD and made itself a meter long appendage, because bigger is better, and now it turned out it’s not fit for purpose? How surprising.