Monthly Archives: January 2025

What the …?

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

IMMEDIATE ACTION FOR NUCLEAR EVENTS

If a nuclear event is occurring or about to occur:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Consequences

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I’m watching the news on the LA fire. The wind over night made everything worse. The fire is spreading and the firemen are having very little control over the situation, regardless of the fact that they brought in all kinds of ground and air assets. Simply put, they allowed the thing to grow too big and now it’s beyond control. They can try and clear the fuel from the fire path, but it’s questionable at this point. The aerial assets are the only ones doing anything, but it’s too little and too late. So, it’s time to consider the consequences.

The economy is going to react to this, but it’s unclear how, because the stock market in America is deeply into the red zone of complete insanity. The first-order analysis would be that the impacted businesses from the area will suffer, the real estate prices will drop like a rock since this will be the final incentive for the rich people to leave, since there’s nothing binding them to the place anymore. Sure, they saw it all go to hell for years but it’s a big thing to sell your house and leave everything you worked most of your life for and rebuild everything in Texas. Also, if your job is there you may not be able to leave at all. But still, one would expect most to leave, and few to rebuild. One would expect the shares of the construction companies to go up, and the insurance companies to go down, but since this is America, it might actually be the other way around. Normally, I would expect gold to go up, since rich people everywhere will understand the need for highly mobile capital; however, since gold is hard to get across the border, crypto assets might be preferred, at least until people realise those are worthless in a real disaster.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory is currently in the fire zone. It’s evacuated, but it is still unclear how affected it will be by the fires. This is a major strategic asset that controls all kinds of automated probes across the Solar System. All of this will be affected and control might be relocated to the Space Command bunker in the Cheyenne mountains or something.

All kinds of woke bullshit will be downgraded after this, and this will ripple out throughout both culture, politics and the economy.

However, this is all assuming that the fire is contained where it is now, and this is unlikely. Most likely, it will spread throughout the more populated LA areas, and the amount of chaos that would produce is hard to imagine – it would be almost on par with a nuclear strike. Around 18M people live in the wider area, and most of them are nowhere near as rich as those impacted so far. If they all have to relocate, and they will if the complex structures are disrupted enough, this will be a zombie apocalypse across America. I’m continuing to watch this closely, but I’m also being careful not to remove my eyes from other points of interest, because this fire increasingly looks like a man-made thing, and it might all be a distraction from something else. Possibly, a way to remove important assets from the X in time, in a more-less controlled manner. You see, I’ve been reading the cold war texts about the plans for the evacuation of the LA metropolitan area, and I know they decided it’s impossible and nothing there can be saved. Maybe someone decided to be proactive. So, the second-order analysis is that this might be a way to evacuate the most important people and assets from the area that is expected to be hit by nuclear weapons and impossible to evacuate at that point.

Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

Fire in LA

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I normally wouldn’t comment on something as arbitrary and random as a natural disaster, but this is different, because what’s happening there is a result of idiotic politics:

Basically, California is leading the rest of America in gender politics, virtue signalling and other leftist bullshit, and this was, similar to the recent fires in Australia, caused by the leftists prohibiting fire fighters from performing controlled burns of the underbrush in order to reduce the amount of flammable material for fires. Also, they are unable to organise transport of water into California, which is naturally a desert, from other places where water is plentiful, because of trivial political reasons such as saving some stupid fish species. However, this is worse than Australia, because in America they fired a huge number of people who resisted the covid vaccine mandates, and are hiring only the politically desirable combinations of black, brown, female and gay, regardless of any kind of merit. Also, their choice of equipment is much worse than what we have in Croatia, which is remarkable considering how much money there is in California. As a result, they have no water, no competent people, and they created the conditions for the perfect firestorm by intentionally failing to do any kind of preventative groundwork. When, inevitably, fire struck, as it normally does in an arid environment such as California, all the political idiots everywhere started babbling nonsense about climate change, which is probably the only factor that demonstrably had nothing to do with the situation.

To me, this kind of insanity and ignoring the physical realities is expected for a civilisation on its way down, but I don’t really pity them, since they are the most arrogant idiots that forcefully spread their idiocy to the rest of us, and the sooner it becomes obvious that they are simply wrong and their path is not to be followed, the better.

Hell

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I had a very interesting private conversation recently, about what happens to the sinful souls that would be expected to end up in hell. I’m going to share the conversation here because it’s universally relevant:

Honestly, your description of hell as ceasing to exist actually sounds pretty good. I mean what’s so good about existence anyway? If all these souls commit all sorts of evil actions and their only punishment is non existence, that sounds like peace and cessation of suffering, while all the good souls are kept alive to suffer and be tortured. It doesn’t make much sense.

It’s funny that it always does sound good to people, but it’s really not. It must be a matter of semantics, or direct insight.

The death of the soul feels like that worst emotional pain you can feel here, but caused by the direct realisation of how completely you fucked up, committing the worst offence, making the worst choices that resulted in terrible suffering of others, basically knowing that you were the instrument of Satan that made this world a hell. Emotional suffering of this karmic actualisation is unbearable and causes the soul to break apart into multiple components, that either continue to break apart or form a stable remainder that is always of a significantly lower “mass” than the original soul, basically it’s comparable to a degradation from a human-type soul to a cockroach-type soul, and it’s not the end of existence, it’s just the end of continuity of existence. It’s like watching your friends graduate, get married, have successful careers, while you are lobotomised and degraded into being someone’s chicken; losing all the connections you had in a long spiritual lifetime, and hoping to eventually evolve, in untold eons, to where you’ve already been, and where you fucked up.
No, it’s not good. It’s worse than any imaginable kind of loss, with more ability to perceive the extent of it all.

Now that you put it that way, it does sound pretty shitty 🙂 Thanks for clarifying, I was thinking it would feel like taking a general anaesthetic or something, just go blank, but that sounds horrible.

There’s another thing. The way I actually observed it working is different from what I described. I described the internal mechanism – karmaśayas break, it destabilises the karmic structure, it loses cohesion and breaks apart. From this description, one would expect a soul to suffer from some kind of agony of conscience that eventually kills it. I never saw anything like that happen. What does happen, in my experience, is that the worst sinners have absolutely no problems with conscience. Especially after they discarnate, they feel completely blissed out, living their best life, and sin, that’s a formality, they are never bothered with something that would reduce their personal happiness (which is probably why they happened to be such terrible humans). Also, Sanat Kumar is an excellent example, because he did absolutely horrible things for a very long time, and he had absolutely no issues with conscience or karmaśayas decaying naturally. So, what kills them isn’t some internal physics of karma, but a result of an external judgment. In 100% of perceived cases, an authorised judge evaluated them and made a verdict which was instantly actualised. Apparently, a lot about karma is very vague until someone looks at it and makes a determination, basically opening the Schroedinger cat’s box. Once the verdict has been made, everything is instant, or almost instant; it happens so quickly that my human brain is really an obstacle in perceiving things that take place so quickly. One moment, you have an evil soul that’s completely blissed out in its self-absorption because it’s now in the astral plane and everything is wonderful, then the verdict is made, and instantly that soul no longer exists, but when I seek out remainders, there usually is something, much smaller, a vague sense of existence, and it’s a painful one, some kind of an agony and deep humiliation and a nasty environment, because apparently conscience and realisation of sin works much better once judgment of God is passed. I feel there is much more to it than that, though. When I try to slow memories down and take a very careful look at it, it seems that the verdict closes the horizon of perception and time, which normally seems to leave things open and undetermined; this verdict creates determination of karmic consequence, which matures and actualises instantly, unlike what happens with encapsulated trauma (aka “larva”), which is wholly dependent on your subjective perception. In this case, it’s about objective judgment of action and its transformation from undetermined into determined form, similar to how the wave function collapses from probability into certainty at the time of detection. When karma becomes determined and actualises, I think only then does my description of what happens become relevant – the cohesive forces that bind soul-particles into soul are overpowered by the repulsive forces, similar to what happens in an explosion, and only if a part of the soul is unaffected by the verdict, ie. not sinful, does it continue existence in some way, but it doesn’t look like a happy kind of existence, more like a nightmarish hell, where one is incredibly diminished, cast out of heaven, and feels spiritual pain for probably all kinds of reasons – remorse (because that part of the soul is healthy enough to actually have conscience that would hurt when showed one’s sinfulness), loss, and so on. So, unlike what the religions imagine, where a soul remains whole but is cast into hell, either eternally or temporarily, it seems that the soul first “explodes” and all of its “fatally unhealthy” parts are completely disintegrated to kalapa level, and only parts that are healthy enough to retain cohesion survive the event, but it’s not a happy kind of survival, because the context of their existence was some kind of a hellish nightmare in every instance I perceived.