Category Archives: science

Americans and nukes

Posted on by
8

I was recently asked (in person) why I think the Americans are considering starting a nuclear war if nuclear weapons are obviously world ending. I answered that the Americans don’t see it that way, and this article shows I was right:

“Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability” said new DoD doctrine before it was taken offline (Steven Aftergood)

What was the reasoning behind my argument? I said that the danger posed by the nuclear weapons was incredibly overstated by the anti-war activists during the 1980s, for instance the entire “nuclear winter” argument is incredibly overstated and there is no reason whatsoever to assume a full nuclear exchange between three superpowers would produce global cooling effects that would be worse than the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, and mankind has seen much worse, for instance “the year without a summer” caused by Mt. Tambora eruption. The people who actually do the thinking for Pentagon have much better information than normal people do, and even better than I do, and I consider myself quite well informed in that regard.

The Pentagon analysts know the data obtained by long-term studies of the participants of Operation Crossroads:

The increase in all-cause mortality was 4.6 percent (relative risk [RR] = 1.046, 95% confidence interval, 1.020–1.074) and was statistically significant (p < 0.001). For malignancies, the elevation of mortality was lower—RR = 1.014 (0.96–1.068)—and was not statistically significant (p = 0.26). Similarly, leukemia mortality RR was elevated to 1.020 (0.75–1.39), but not significantly (p = 0.90) and by less than all-cause mortality. The increase in all-cause mortality did not appear to concentrate in any of the disease groups we considered.

TL;DR version for people with American-levels of attention span is that the Americans did a series of nuclear weapon tests in Bikini 1946, to see how nukes would influence surface ships. Everybody was exposed to radiation and all kinds of fallout including un-fissioned Plutonium, and when you read articles about it you expect everybody to have died from cancer within five years from the experiment. However, it turns out that, to quote Wikipedia, “one study showed that the life expectancy of participants was reduced by an average of three months”. In the time-span of half a century.

The data from other nuclear mishaps including Chernobyl shows similar, quite surprising outcomes. Stress from relocation is the main cause of death. People who didn’t evacuate from the exclusion zone had better health outcomes than those who were evacuated. The data from the Soviet K-19 submarine, nicknamed “Hiroshima”, where the officers decided to re-route radioactive coolant of the reactor through an external pump, spraying everybody on the ship with super-radioactive coolant, stuff got into the ventilation system and everybody was exposed to high levels of radiation. Of the crew of 125, “twenty-two crew members died during the following two years” (Wikipedia). Having in mind that they were sprayed with and/or inhaled radioactive substance while sealed in a metal container, one would expect everybody to have died of cancer; however, I’ve seen survivors living to very old age.

Essentially, you can even survive the levels of radiation exposure causing acute radiation sickness and live to die of old age in your 80s. Radiation is quite deadly in extreme doses, but those extreme doses are actually extreme, the kind Pripyat firemen received during their unfortunate attempt of putting down a reactor fire in Chernobyl. However, there are strong indications that both wildlife and humans can be exposed to quite high levels of radiation in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and live quite normally.

Also, the amount of radioactive fallout released during the Castle Bravo fuckup was so large, it’s what one would expect from a limited nuclear war with dozens of atmospheric MIRV warhead explosions, and guess what, we’re still here. So, having in mind what I know, there are very good reasons to believe that the Pentagon people know more. Knowing more, they fear nuclear war less. However, the potential for miscalculations is great. They may plan for a limited nuclear exchange within a tolerable range of outcomes, and things may escalate wildly and end up as something altogether different.

 

About hurricanes and global warming

Posted on by
1

Are the hurricanes caused by global warming? Julian Assange apparently thinks so.

Yes. The globe is warming during the summer, and in the beginning of autumn the oceans are cooling off in a chaotic thermodynamic process called hurricane. This removes the excess of heat accumulated into the oceans; the more heat, and the greater the thermal difference between oceans and atmosphere, the more violent the hurricane.

The funniest thing is, the CO2 model of anthropogenic global warming would actually require the hurricanes to be less violent, because less solar energy accumulated during the summer would be released into space due to the glasshouse effect; this energy would stay here, and cause milder winters, which would in turn cause less growth of the polar ice during the winter, and increased melting during the summer. This would quickly cause the polar caps to melt and the sea levels to rise. The violent hurricanes mean that the energy that would cause this was safely released into space.

Also, the fact that a hurricane is more devastating doesn’t make it stronger. What makes it devastating is when it hits areas with expensive real estate and wealthy people. When it pulverizes Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti or Philippines, and a huge number of poor people lose their cheap homes, everybody shrugs. When it hits St. Bart’s where rich people have their fancy vacations, it’s suddenly the most devastating tragedy ever. The hurricanes didn’t become better or worse – they simply wreck things in their path, and if you’re in their path, you’re fucked. They aren’t the creatures of anthropogenic global warming, they are the creatures of seasonal global cooling. The most devastating one in US history happened 1900 in Galveston. It killed between 6000 and 12000 people, not because it was that huge (it was category 4), but because it hit a densely populated area just right, creating a storm surge of 4.6m. Essentially, it’s the flooding that’s the problem, and when it hits low-lying towns, you can get massive destruction.

According to measurements, global warming between the 1980s and 2017, anthropogenic or otherwise, is in the order of magnitude of a tenth of one degree Celsius (0.1 ºC). This is well within any conceivable margin of error in measurement; essentially, it means no global warming was recorded. It could be argued that any measurements between 1900 and now, that show warming, are due to uncertainty in measurement and local statistic variance, than anything else. Basically, the whole thing is a storm in a teapot. Those minuscule differences amount to exactly jack shit regarding global climate change. In fact, in the 1970s people thought they observed a global cooling trend, and what’s interesting is that the proposed “cure” was the same: it’s the evil capitalist industrial society that’s to blame, and we need more state power to regulate things and wind down the rampant capitalist development, or we’ll end up in an early ice age. Now, it’s we need more state power to regulate things and wind down the rampant capitalist development, or we’ll end up in an glasshouse jungle, the polar caps will melt and the hurricanes will get us all.

It’s all communist bullshit. When the communist bloc fell apart (in fact, when the extent of Stalin’s crimes was revealed), all the university-educated leftist fucktards in the West lost their main hope for communism to rule the world so they switched their world-saving efforts from class warfare to environmentalism. Now they are adding cultural warfare for transgender bathrooms and language policing to the list of their world-saving efforts.

The leftists are not saving the world. They are fucking it up, from French revolution onwards. The only thing those “progressives” are good at is inventing bullshit theories based on which they kill millions and destroy everybody’s lives. The only ones I know of who were actually saving anything and making actual progress are the likes of Jesus and Buddha. The guys publishing “scientific” articles about anthropogenic global warming are just milking the state funding for what it’s worth.

What is truth?

Posted on by
3

Pontius Pilatus once asked a rhetorical question, “What is truth?”

I noticed a pattern: people who are the most skeptical about the possibility of existence of an absolute truth are those who are morally and intellectually corrupt, who have made so many compromises and wrong choices that they no longer have any soul left. When someone questions the existence of truth, it’s his own existence that is in question, because he no longer knows who or what he is.

The matter of truth, however, is a tricky one, because it is usually defined as statement of fact, and what is considered to be a fact can indeed depend on one’s point of view, or depth of knowledge. It was long considered a fact that the Sun moves around the Earth, because that’s what was perceived. Only with deeper intellectual and perceptual insight was it revealed that the movement of the Sun is an artifact of Earth’s rotation. However, the statement that the Sun moves on the sky is true, and this truth was a necessary step towards the discovery of deeper truths about orbital mechanics. If you deny that the Sun moves, you can’t measure anything properly, and without measurement the door to further discovery is closed.

I therefore define truth as a process of discovering reality. Truth is a process. This process goes from establishing and stating the basic facts, as they are perceived, and going from there into the abstract layer of interpretation, of figuring out what it means. You state the fact that the Sun and the stars move across the sky, you measure what precisely is going on, and if your measurements are accurate enough, a Newton can use them to apply calculus and create a model of the solar system. However, there will be discrepancies between the model and the reality, and those discrepancies need to be carefully measured and noted, because an Einstein can then use them to model his general relativity. So, accurate perception and clear statement of facts are the necessary prerequisites in the process of following lesser truths towards the greater ones, on the path of revelation of reality.

So, as much as truth is a process, so is lie. Lie is a process of obscuring the facts, of incorrectly reporting them and interpreting them in a way whose purpose is to hide reality and replace it with an illusion.

The absolute, final reality, the goal at the end of the path of truth, is God. To lie, is to stray from this path, and to lead others astray. To choose lies, to relativize truth, makes one an enemy of God.

I shit on climate science

Posted on by
9

The main-stream media presented us with the “scientific facts”, in form of the polls showing how Donald Trump lags significantly behind Hillary Clinton and has no chance of winning the elections. They laughed at anyone questioning the scientific accuracy and validity of those polls. They presented themselves as someone who speaks from the position of science, truth, evidence and reason.

All of that proved to be bullshit and propaganda. The polls were intentionally cooked up by oversampling Democrats, by intentionally oversampling target groups that were more likely to vote for Clinton, basically, they started with the desired result and cooked up a scientifically-sounding brew of horse shit.

But stay assured that every other thing they have been telling you is spot on, like the global warming, which is so incredibly discredited that its advocates are using progressively stronger magnifying glass to find any sign of the supposed climate change, at the times where the original theory predicted that all coastal areas of the world should have been under water already. God fucking damn it, even Venice, which is built on water, still exists. Krapanj island in Croatia, whose highest point above sea level is 1.25 meters, is still completely untouched by the supposedly rampant sea level rise. We have more green areas in the previously arid parts of the world (because CO2 is plant food, and the plants immediately responded with accelerated growth in response to its increased availability), so no desertification, and no climate-caused exodus from the endangered areas. Antarctic ice cap is actually showing the overall increase. Arctic ice cap is also increasing in the recent years. Analysis of data from the NASA satellites shows no reduction in polar ice since they started recording the data in 1979.

It’s all horse shit, the entire supposed science behind the global warming theory. The scientific part was extremely poorly done, doesn’t hold up to even the slightest scrutiny and I lost all confidence in it a decade ago, when the predictions started to prove false.

But yeah, President Trump is a joke and climate change is gospel. Believe in it in order to get more likes on Facefuck and have more hip friends who fucking love science, bitch.

Because education, and shit.

The role of intellect in spirituality (translation)

Posted on by
Reply

(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”.