I looked for total gasoline consumption in the United States per year and found it to be 2.5 billion barrels. One barrel is 42 gallons, so the United States uses 106 billion gallons of oil per year. 700 million gallons saved equals 0.65% of 106 billion gallons total. How does Exxon Mobil stand to benefit from creating an advertisment telling us we could save less than one percent of our total gasoline consumption? They obviously didn't count on people taking the time to do the calculations to figure out they're selling us a scam, but what their exact goals are and how they stand to profit from this, I do not yet know.
-Dee
Monday, December 27, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
If You Just Properly Inflate Your Tires...
According to a new Exxon Mobil advertisment, if everyone in America properly inflated their tires we would save 700 million gallons of gasoline per year. The president had a similar argument in 2008 that if everyone would just properly inflate their tires we would never have to drill for oil. I did some quick searching to the Bureau of Transit Statistics and the Department of Energy and after some calculations discovered that 700 million gallons of gasoline divided among every gasoline powered vehicle in America ammounts to just over 3 gallons per vehicle per year, or $9.24 per vehicle per year. That's just over $2 Billion total saved. This hardly seems like something to brag about, so I suggest it is propaganda. While our oil rights are sold to other countries who stands to benefit from the United States tied down by foreign oil debt?
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
I Am Big Mind
Ken Wilber gives the best description of your true nature that I have ever heard. Remember from yesterday, the purpose of manifestation is lila? Here's how you get back. Simply recognize your own I am-ness. You're aware of objects right now? Of course you are. YOU are aware of objects, but YOU are not an object, YOU are the subject, and to recognize your awareness of those objects is to recognize your true self. If you get distracted throughout the day, just remember who it is that is distracted. I am distracted. If any of this confuses you just recognize I am confused, and you've got it. It's that simple.
Monday, December 20, 2010
What Is The Point To Creation?
Ken Wilber talks about evolution and the point of creation, Maya, as God's lila. Talking about the Absolute is useless, so every explanation must be metaphor. If God is infinite and perfect, why create anything? The only way to answer this question is to awaken to your true nature.
The Master's Effulgence
From The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
Vedanta
"The Brahmani was the enthusiastic teacher and astonished beholder of Sri Ramakrishna in his spiritual progress. She became proud of the achievements of her unique pupil. But the pupil himself was not permitted to rest; his destiny beckoned him forward. His Divine Mother would allow him no respite till he had left behind the entire realm of duality with its visions, emotions, and ecstatic dreams. But for the new ascent the old tender guide would not suffice. The Brahmani, on whom he had depended for three years, saw her son escape from her to follow the command of a teacher with masculine strength, a sterner mien, a gnarled physique, and a virile voice. The new guru was a wondering monk, the sturdy Totapuri, whom Sri Ramakrishna learnt to address affectionately as Nangta, the 'Naked One,' because of his total renunciation of all earthly attachments and objects, including even a piece of wearing-cloth.
"Totapuri was the bearer of a philosophy new to Sri Ramakrishna, the Non-dualistic Vedanta, whose conclusions Totapuri had experienced in his own life. This ancient Hindu system designates the Ultimate Reality as Brahman, also described as Satchidananda, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Brahman is the only Real Existence. In It there is no time, no space, no causality, no multiplicity. But through maya – its inscrutable Power – time, space, and causality are projected and the One appears to break into the many. The non-dual Spirit appears as multiple individuals endowed with forms and subject to the conditions of time. The Immortal becomes a victim of birth and death. The Changeless undergoes change. The sinless Pure Soul, hypnotized by Its own maya, experiences the joys of heaven and the pains of hell. But these experiences based on the duality of the subject-object relationship are unreal. Even the vision of a Personal God is, ultimately speaking, as illusory as the experience of any other object. Man attains his liberation, therefore, by piercing the veil of maya and rediscovering his total identity with Brahman. Knowing himself to be one with the Universal Spirit, he realizes ineffable Peace. Only then does he go beyond the fiction of birth and death; only then does he become immortal. And this is the ultimate goal of Vedanta – to dehypnotize the soul now hypnotized by its own ignorance.
"The path of the Vedantic discipline is the path of negation, 'neti,' in which, by stern determination, all that is unreal is renounced. It is the path of jnana, knowledge, the direct method of realizing the Absolute. After the negation of everything relative, including the discriminating ego itself, the aspirant merges in the One without a second, in the bliss of nirvikalpa samadhi, where subject and object are alike dissolved. The soul goes beyond the realm of thought. The domain of duality is transcended. Maya is left behind with all its changes and modifications. The Real Man towers above the delusions of creation, preservation, and destruction. An avalanche of indescribable Bliss sweeps away all relative ideas of pain and pleasure, good and evil. There shines in the heart of glory of the Eternal Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Knower, knowledge, and known are dissolved in the Ocean of one eternal Consciousness; love, lover, and beloved merge in the unbounded Sea of supreme Felicity; birth, growth, and death vanish in infinite Existence. All doubts and misgivings are quelled for ever; the oscillations of the mind are stopped; the momentum of past actions is exhausted. Breaking down the ridgepole of the tabernacle in which the soul has made its abode for untold ages, stilling the body, calming the mind, drowning the ego, the joy of Brahman wells up in the superconscious state. Space disappears into Pure Being, time is swallowed up in eternity, and causation becomes a dream of the past. Only Existence is. Who can describe what the soul then feels in its communion with the Self?
"Even when a man descends from this dizzy hight, he is devoid of ideas of 'I' and 'mine'; he looks on the body as a mere shadow, an outer sheath encasing the soul. He does not dwell on the past, takes no thought for the future, and looks with indifference on the present. He surveys everything in the world with an eye of equality; he is no longer touched by the infinite variety of phenomena; he no longer reacts to pleasure and pain. He remains unmoved whether he – that is to say, his body – is worshipped by the good or tormented by the wicked; for he realizes that it is the one Brahman that manifests Itself through everything. The impact of such an experience devastates the body and mind. Consciousness becomes blasted, as it were, with an excess of light. In the Vedantic books it is said that after the experience of nirvikalpa samadhi the body drops off like a dry leaf. Only those who are born with a special mission for humanity can return from this height to the valleys of normal life. They live and move in the world for the welfare of mankind. They are invested with a supreme spiritual power. A divine glory shines through them."
Vedanta
"The Brahmani was the enthusiastic teacher and astonished beholder of Sri Ramakrishna in his spiritual progress. She became proud of the achievements of her unique pupil. But the pupil himself was not permitted to rest; his destiny beckoned him forward. His Divine Mother would allow him no respite till he had left behind the entire realm of duality with its visions, emotions, and ecstatic dreams. But for the new ascent the old tender guide would not suffice. The Brahmani, on whom he had depended for three years, saw her son escape from her to follow the command of a teacher with masculine strength, a sterner mien, a gnarled physique, and a virile voice. The new guru was a wondering monk, the sturdy Totapuri, whom Sri Ramakrishna learnt to address affectionately as Nangta, the 'Naked One,' because of his total renunciation of all earthly attachments and objects, including even a piece of wearing-cloth.
"Totapuri was the bearer of a philosophy new to Sri Ramakrishna, the Non-dualistic Vedanta, whose conclusions Totapuri had experienced in his own life. This ancient Hindu system designates the Ultimate Reality as Brahman, also described as Satchidananda, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Brahman is the only Real Existence. In It there is no time, no space, no causality, no multiplicity. But through maya – its inscrutable Power – time, space, and causality are projected and the One appears to break into the many. The non-dual Spirit appears as multiple individuals endowed with forms and subject to the conditions of time. The Immortal becomes a victim of birth and death. The Changeless undergoes change. The sinless Pure Soul, hypnotized by Its own maya, experiences the joys of heaven and the pains of hell. But these experiences based on the duality of the subject-object relationship are unreal. Even the vision of a Personal God is, ultimately speaking, as illusory as the experience of any other object. Man attains his liberation, therefore, by piercing the veil of maya and rediscovering his total identity with Brahman. Knowing himself to be one with the Universal Spirit, he realizes ineffable Peace. Only then does he go beyond the fiction of birth and death; only then does he become immortal. And this is the ultimate goal of Vedanta – to dehypnotize the soul now hypnotized by its own ignorance.
"The path of the Vedantic discipline is the path of negation, 'neti,' in which, by stern determination, all that is unreal is renounced. It is the path of jnana, knowledge, the direct method of realizing the Absolute. After the negation of everything relative, including the discriminating ego itself, the aspirant merges in the One without a second, in the bliss of nirvikalpa samadhi, where subject and object are alike dissolved. The soul goes beyond the realm of thought. The domain of duality is transcended. Maya is left behind with all its changes and modifications. The Real Man towers above the delusions of creation, preservation, and destruction. An avalanche of indescribable Bliss sweeps away all relative ideas of pain and pleasure, good and evil. There shines in the heart of glory of the Eternal Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. Knower, knowledge, and known are dissolved in the Ocean of one eternal Consciousness; love, lover, and beloved merge in the unbounded Sea of supreme Felicity; birth, growth, and death vanish in infinite Existence. All doubts and misgivings are quelled for ever; the oscillations of the mind are stopped; the momentum of past actions is exhausted. Breaking down the ridgepole of the tabernacle in which the soul has made its abode for untold ages, stilling the body, calming the mind, drowning the ego, the joy of Brahman wells up in the superconscious state. Space disappears into Pure Being, time is swallowed up in eternity, and causation becomes a dream of the past. Only Existence is. Who can describe what the soul then feels in its communion with the Self?
"Even when a man descends from this dizzy hight, he is devoid of ideas of 'I' and 'mine'; he looks on the body as a mere shadow, an outer sheath encasing the soul. He does not dwell on the past, takes no thought for the future, and looks with indifference on the present. He surveys everything in the world with an eye of equality; he is no longer touched by the infinite variety of phenomena; he no longer reacts to pleasure and pain. He remains unmoved whether he – that is to say, his body – is worshipped by the good or tormented by the wicked; for he realizes that it is the one Brahman that manifests Itself through everything. The impact of such an experience devastates the body and mind. Consciousness becomes blasted, as it were, with an excess of light. In the Vedantic books it is said that after the experience of nirvikalpa samadhi the body drops off like a dry leaf. Only those who are born with a special mission for humanity can return from this height to the valleys of normal life. They live and move in the world for the welfare of mankind. They are invested with a supreme spiritual power. A divine glory shines through them."
Sunday, December 19, 2010
A Pocketful of Miracles
From the original Urban Mystic, 19 August 2007. The tone of some of the older posts appears to be a bit harsher. I was coming out of being a skep-dick and while materialism had been dropped it would be a few years before the desire to attack everyone fell away as well. Accept this post for what it is.
From Michael Talbot's Holographic Universe (p. 119-120):
"Every year in September and May a huge crowd gathers at the Duomo San Gennaro, the principal cathedral of Naples, to witness a miracle. The miracle involves a small vial containing a brown crusty substance alleged to be the blood of San Gennaro, or St. Januarius, who was beheaded by the Roman emperor Diocletian in A.D. 305. According to legend, after the saint was martyred a serving woman collected some of his blood as a relic. No one knows precisely what happened after that, save that the blood didn't turn up again until the end of the thirteenth century when it was ensconced in a silver reliquary in the cathedral.
"The miracle is that twice yearly, when the crowd shouts at the vial, the brown crusty substance changes into a bubbling, bright red liquid. There is little doubt that the liquid is real blood. in 1902 a group of scientists from the University of Naples made a spectroscopic analysis of the liquid by passing a beam of light through it, verifying that it was blood. Unfortunately, because the reliquary containing the blood is so old and fragile, the church will not allow it to be cracked open so that other tests can be done, and so the phenomenon has never been thoroughly studied.
"But there is further evidence that the transformation is a more than ordinary event. Occasionally throughout history (the first written account of the public performance of the miracle dates back to 1389) when the vial is brought out, the blood refuses to liquefy. Although rare, this is considered a very bad omen by the citizens of Naples. In the past, the failure of the miracle has directly preceded the eruption of Vesuvius and the Napoleonic invasion of Naples. More recently, in 1976 and 1978, it presaged the worst earthquake in Italian history and the election of a communist city government in naples, respectively.
"Is the liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood a miracle? It appears to be, at least in the sense that it seems impossible to explain by known scientific laws." [emphasis added]
He goes on to suggest psi phenomena are involved, but more on that later.
There you have it, folks. The substance in the vial has incontestably been proven to be blood. However some skep-dicks and fundamaterialists will tell you that it is a thixotropic gel (like ketchup) that liquefies when stirred or shaken hard enough. How they can say this when hard, irrefutable proof they are wrong is staring them in the face is beyond my comprehension. Because the study happened in 1902 does not in any way refute the results or make them less acceptable. If that were the case we should throw out Newton and Galileo because their findings are hundreds of years old. Are their moons around Jupiter? Hell no! The most recient findings were in the 70's, and that's way before modern skep-dickal science was invented in 2007. We shouldn't believe it at all. Give me a break. Vintage does not detract from science. If the blood miracle is fake the priests would have to know in advance when horrible events were about to happen. Either way the skep-dicks lose. Either they say it is blood in the vial or that predicting the future is real. There's a bullet in every chamber. Psychic phenomena are the only two options. Good times.
-Dee
From Michael Talbot's Holographic Universe (p. 119-120):
"Every year in September and May a huge crowd gathers at the Duomo San Gennaro, the principal cathedral of Naples, to witness a miracle. The miracle involves a small vial containing a brown crusty substance alleged to be the blood of San Gennaro, or St. Januarius, who was beheaded by the Roman emperor Diocletian in A.D. 305. According to legend, after the saint was martyred a serving woman collected some of his blood as a relic. No one knows precisely what happened after that, save that the blood didn't turn up again until the end of the thirteenth century when it was ensconced in a silver reliquary in the cathedral.
"The miracle is that twice yearly, when the crowd shouts at the vial, the brown crusty substance changes into a bubbling, bright red liquid. There is little doubt that the liquid is real blood. in 1902 a group of scientists from the University of Naples made a spectroscopic analysis of the liquid by passing a beam of light through it, verifying that it was blood. Unfortunately, because the reliquary containing the blood is so old and fragile, the church will not allow it to be cracked open so that other tests can be done, and so the phenomenon has never been thoroughly studied.
"But there is further evidence that the transformation is a more than ordinary event. Occasionally throughout history (the first written account of the public performance of the miracle dates back to 1389) when the vial is brought out, the blood refuses to liquefy. Although rare, this is considered a very bad omen by the citizens of Naples. In the past, the failure of the miracle has directly preceded the eruption of Vesuvius and the Napoleonic invasion of Naples. More recently, in 1976 and 1978, it presaged the worst earthquake in Italian history and the election of a communist city government in naples, respectively.
"Is the liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood a miracle? It appears to be, at least in the sense that it seems impossible to explain by known scientific laws." [emphasis added]
He goes on to suggest psi phenomena are involved, but more on that later.
There you have it, folks. The substance in the vial has incontestably been proven to be blood. However some skep-dicks and fundamaterialists will tell you that it is a thixotropic gel (like ketchup) that liquefies when stirred or shaken hard enough. How they can say this when hard, irrefutable proof they are wrong is staring them in the face is beyond my comprehension. Because the study happened in 1902 does not in any way refute the results or make them less acceptable. If that were the case we should throw out Newton and Galileo because their findings are hundreds of years old. Are their moons around Jupiter? Hell no! The most recient findings were in the 70's, and that's way before modern skep-dickal science was invented in 2007. We shouldn't believe it at all. Give me a break. Vintage does not detract from science. If the blood miracle is fake the priests would have to know in advance when horrible events were about to happen. Either way the skep-dicks lose. Either they say it is blood in the vial or that predicting the future is real. There's a bullet in every chamber. Psychic phenomena are the only two options. Good times.
-Dee
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Interesting Facts
I did some calculations and found that this December contains the two longest posts in Urban Mystic history: Joshua, Jericho, and Hating Jews, and Survival of Someone, in that order, at 1243 and 1214 words. I'm Still A Creep II is the third longest post ever at 1044 words, but it is a transcript of a dialogue I had with two other people so a lot of it isn't my own. Few other posts seem to exceed 900 words, with the longer ones averaging 700-850 words a piece. Considering I wrote the longest post ever on the backs of two envelopes at 8:40 yesterday morning (15 December) I'd say that must be a topic I'm pretty passionate about. Well, enjoy my three longest posts. Always love.
-Dee
-Dee
Joshua, Jericho, and Hating Jews
Mahalia Jackson sings about Jericho, as it actually happened, in this 1964 video.
There is a gulf between archaeologists and the truth regarding all things biblical. Take the story of Joshua and the conquest of Canaan. The goal of archaeology seems to seperate the dates of the destruction of Jericho and other Canaan cities and the dates of Joshua and the Exodus as much as possible to discredit the whole story.
Kathleen Kenyon, a British archaeologist who excavated Jericho in the 1950s claims that the city was destroyed circa 1400 BC and that the Exodus occurred in 1250 BC, so the Israelites couldn't have destroyed the city. More recent dating puts the destruction of Jericho at 1550 BC, a full three centuries before the supposed date of the Exodus. The problem could be explained as followes: Suppose archaeologists a thousand years from now want to search for evidence of World War II, but they know with absolute certainty that the fiercest fighting of the war took place between 1744-45. They also don't believe in Nazis. So, when they look through the ruins of the old world they find a battle that took place in 1945, but none during 1745, so they conclude that the war in 1945 was some other war, certainly not World War II, and that the Nazis didn't exist because no evidence could be found for them in the ruins of the 18th century. Modern archaeologists, who don't believe in the Bible and who hate the Jews and Israel say that the Exodus happened in the 13th century BC (which they call BCE, but that's a whole other post) so when Jericho was destroyed in the 16th century it must have been someone else. Maybe it was the Syrians, oops, they call themselves Palestinians now, because we know they are the true and legitimate inhabitants of the land.
But what if the Exodus didn't happen in 1250? What if it did happen closer to 1550? After all, the grain at the city of Jericho and other sites was burned along with the cities, not plundered, just as Joshua told his army to do. Any invading army would plunder the cities they sack, but Joshua told his men not to plunder the sites. The goods of the city belong to God, not the Israelites, so they have to burn, not plunder them. This is exactly what we find, and exactly what would be expected if Joshua destroyed the city, not some fictional people hundreds of years prior. The dates of the destruction of the cities is based on hard evidence, the dates of the Exodus is based on speculation from texts. Speculation is far from evidence. Speculation can be wrong, and the Exodus can be a 16th century event. But why would anyone want to hide the truth?
Scholars claim that the story of the destruction of Jericho is etiological. The Israelites saw the cities, destroyed centuries before they arrived, and invented a fictional story to explain why those cities were destroyed. The story is fake, like all good biblical revisionists and fundamaterialists must believe, but the descriptions of the physical sites are accurate. But why should we believe that the Israelites excavated the cities, destroyed and buried three centuries before they arrived, found the broken walls, found the grain burned and not plundered, and invent a story to explain their finding? Why would a semi-nomadic people invent archaeology, undergo a huge excavation, and then write fiction about what they discovered? This is a far more complex explanation than saying the Exodus happened three centuries earlier than modern revisionists suppose.
The story has to be fake according to the revisionists. They believe there is a war between science and religion where such a war does not exist. They must debunk religion. But debunking isn't something science does, it's something the skep-dicks and TV magicians do. Science is open ended.
Debunking the conquest of Canaan deligitimises the Israelies' claim to the land. Modern liberal racists (~99% of academia) HATE Israel because it is the single light of freedom in the Near East. Liberal racists HATE freedom and every libertine idea. They are statists and Muslim theocracies are very statist regimes. Also, they hate "colonialism," which is what they see Israel as, for two reasons: 1. Israel was created by the British during the end of the colonial period, and 2. Israeli forces in the Syrian, oops, Palestinian territories is seen as a form of colonialism. Colonialism is much hated even though libocrats wouldn't exist without it. If not for colonialism there would be no academia because there would be no rich and powerful colonial powers to set up academies, as colonial powers get their power and wealth from their colonies. Before the rise of the colonial powers all academies were religious, and the libocrats HATE religion, except Islam because it is used by statist regimes, unlike other religions, and libocrats love statism, as all aristocrats do. Libocrats are willing to do anything, especially lie about science, to get rid of Israel and religion.
Well, there does exist an exception. One colony is good: Tibet. Why? Because the Chicoms are communist, and libocrats love communism above everything else in the whole world. China invading, conquering Tibet, and slaughtering one million Tibetans is wonderful to the Libocrats because it is part of the spread of communism.
The same can be said for the Muslim "archaeologists" who control the Temple Mount. They'll say there is no evidence of the Jews being in their "Palestine" at any point in history prior to 1923, the date the British Mandate went into effect. There is no evidence of David or Solomon, nothing to suggest anything but their mosques, designed in the style of the Roman temple to Jupiter at Baalbek, Lebanon, with its hexagonal structure exactly where the Dome of the Rock sits, and its rectangular structure exactly where the Al Aqsa Mosque sits, the space between the two being where the old Herodian Jewish temple was before it was destroyed (see diagram of how the two complexes, Roman and Islamic, look overlayed). These are the same Muslim "archaeologists" who say nothing existed in the Arabian peninsula before Islam, because they destroyed evidence of the Sassanid Persians, who controlled just about the whole area, as well as the countless sophisticated empires who occupied the area for millennia. When these discrepancies are pointed out they smile their asshole smile and laugh their asshole laugh and come up with some horseshit excuse and say "oh, we cannot let Jews onto the Temple Mount or build their temples between ours," leaving out the part where they think to themselves "because we want to exterminate them." You should take notice that 24% of Syrio-Palestinians, which I may start calling them, approve of terrorism against the US, with another 15% being somewhat ambivalent. Yes, the same people who claim the Jews never occupied Israel before 1923 support killing US civilians to achieve political goals. But they're good people, really.
This is why there exists a gulf between mainstream archaeology, which is run by fundamaterialist libocrats, and the true story of the Exodus, which likely did occur in the 16th century. Both groups want to delegitimise Israel, one out of disgust for religion and "colonialism," the other out of a desire to conquer and convert the world. Both create fictitional archaeology to support their claims.
Video, "There was nothing before Islam!
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Beyond and Back
Sunday Night I watched a show on the Biography Channel called I Survived... Beyond and Back. The official website describes it as follows:
"I Survived... Beyond and Back reveals one of life's greatest mysteries by profiling the extraordinary stories of people who have literally passed on to the other side. The series combines the compelling and emotionally gripping stories of I Survived... with the unexplainable experiences some people... "
I read about it from comments on Michael Prescott's Blog. After two hours I have a really mixed reaction. The parts that I like I really like, and the parts that I dislike I really dislike.
To start off, the show opens with a juvenile, ghoulish, really cheesy neon green slime covering the original I Survived... opening screen, and from this slime drips the words "Beyond and Back" like ooh, it's spooky or something. Already I'm wondering if I'm supposed to take this program seriously or not with an opening straight out of a second grade class' Halloween special.
The program features three different people telling stories of the day they died, what killed them, what they saw on the other side, how they came back, and how their life has changed afterward. This is wonderful. The world needs at least nine more programs like this where people tell of their death experiences. It is uplifting and magnificent and the people are treated with great respect and no one tries to debunk anything. Their first hand accounts are presented of their experiences along with the experiences of the people who helped revive them, and that's it. There is no armchair commentator, just people telling their own stories. This is raw data, and I love data, completely unsullied by intellectualism of any kind.
The bad part is that all three stories are told simultaneously. Each person will tell a little bit of their story, then the program cuts to the next person and the next, then there's a commercial. After the commercial the people resume their stories in the same order. When the stories resume there's a brief recap of what was said, something that would be completely unnecessary if each person could tell their story in its entirety without being cut off. There are four commercial breaks per hour show, so there's a whole lot of repetition, just like in Buddhist stories, only not to drill the point home but to remind the viewer what just happened because the format sucks. The show is made very confusing and roughly half an hour of material is padded into a full hour show It is difficult to really get into any one story when in ADD fashion they're presented in little bites.
When each person dies theire's a neon green EKG thing that beeps a couple of times then goes flat. Periodically throughout each person's story there's a little thing that reads:
♥Heart Stopped
0:00
It ticks for three or four seconds, making a very annoying and strange tolling sound every second. This sound is probably the worst part of the show. They couldn't have used any of the many more obvious sounds to mark the passage of each second, a tick, a beep, no, they use the most bizarre and annoying sound possible. All the while the story does not progress until the timer disappears.
The people tell their stories of what they saw on the other side, some accounts are very short (the shortest I recall was just over 3 minutes) and some are almost an hour (57 minutes was the longest). Meanwhile the people who are with their physical body tells the story of how they try to revive them.
When the people are revived the EKG thing reappears, their heart beating again. They then tell how their life has changed, and boy howdy has it ever. They are more loving, jovial, compassionate people who appreciate life more. They also have to readapt to life on earth. This part too is wonderful.
What Beyond and Back is is not a typical NDE program, it is a NDE program with Hollywood flair added and cheap special effects to capture an audience with a three second attention span. However, it is not a debunking program but is instead sympathetic to these people's experiences and for that I am greatful. Overall I will continue to watch Beyond and Back, at least for awhile. I recommend the program to you, my valued couple of readers and invite you to make up your own minds.
-Dee
"I Survived... Beyond and Back reveals one of life's greatest mysteries by profiling the extraordinary stories of people who have literally passed on to the other side. The series combines the compelling and emotionally gripping stories of I Survived... with the unexplainable experiences some people... "
I read about it from comments on Michael Prescott's Blog. After two hours I have a really mixed reaction. The parts that I like I really like, and the parts that I dislike I really dislike.
To start off, the show opens with a juvenile, ghoulish, really cheesy neon green slime covering the original I Survived... opening screen, and from this slime drips the words "Beyond and Back" like ooh, it's spooky or something. Already I'm wondering if I'm supposed to take this program seriously or not with an opening straight out of a second grade class' Halloween special.
The program features three different people telling stories of the day they died, what killed them, what they saw on the other side, how they came back, and how their life has changed afterward. This is wonderful. The world needs at least nine more programs like this where people tell of their death experiences. It is uplifting and magnificent and the people are treated with great respect and no one tries to debunk anything. Their first hand accounts are presented of their experiences along with the experiences of the people who helped revive them, and that's it. There is no armchair commentator, just people telling their own stories. This is raw data, and I love data, completely unsullied by intellectualism of any kind.
The bad part is that all three stories are told simultaneously. Each person will tell a little bit of their story, then the program cuts to the next person and the next, then there's a commercial. After the commercial the people resume their stories in the same order. When the stories resume there's a brief recap of what was said, something that would be completely unnecessary if each person could tell their story in its entirety without being cut off. There are four commercial breaks per hour show, so there's a whole lot of repetition, just like in Buddhist stories, only not to drill the point home but to remind the viewer what just happened because the format sucks. The show is made very confusing and roughly half an hour of material is padded into a full hour show It is difficult to really get into any one story when in ADD fashion they're presented in little bites.
When each person dies theire's a neon green EKG thing that beeps a couple of times then goes flat. Periodically throughout each person's story there's a little thing that reads:
♥Heart Stopped
0:00
It ticks for three or four seconds, making a very annoying and strange tolling sound every second. This sound is probably the worst part of the show. They couldn't have used any of the many more obvious sounds to mark the passage of each second, a tick, a beep, no, they use the most bizarre and annoying sound possible. All the while the story does not progress until the timer disappears.
The people tell their stories of what they saw on the other side, some accounts are very short (the shortest I recall was just over 3 minutes) and some are almost an hour (57 minutes was the longest). Meanwhile the people who are with their physical body tells the story of how they try to revive them.
When the people are revived the EKG thing reappears, their heart beating again. They then tell how their life has changed, and boy howdy has it ever. They are more loving, jovial, compassionate people who appreciate life more. They also have to readapt to life on earth. This part too is wonderful.
What Beyond and Back is is not a typical NDE program, it is a NDE program with Hollywood flair added and cheap special effects to capture an audience with a three second attention span. However, it is not a debunking program but is instead sympathetic to these people's experiences and for that I am greatful. Overall I will continue to watch Beyond and Back, at least for awhile. I recommend the program to you, my valued couple of readers and invite you to make up your own minds.
-Dee
Monday, December 13, 2010
An Islamic History of India
An historical perspective of Islam in India, the massive slaughter of early invaders and the terror attacks of today. Tolerance of Muslims in India and persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Aprox. 20 minutes.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Still Forbidden
You may remember in September I posted about Bob Couttie and his book Forbidden Knowledge. I was holding onto that book to read in December like The Geller Papers. Reading both books in the same month, a year apart, and reporting on them seemed fitting. Seems a monkey has been thrown into my plans. Right now I am in the middle of what looks like the largest research project I have ever taken on. I have well over 2000 pages to read (1500 left!) and will not be able to read Forbidden Knowledge and report on it here for you, my valued couple of readers, and Mr. Couttie who appears from time to time to stir the pot here. I still have ten videos made in November as a reserve to upload regularly, but taking on extra reading will be out of the question.
-Dee
-Dee
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Who the Hell do You Think You Are
Nigel Farage, MEP from the UK demonstrates yet again why the EU sucks. Not only do Europeans have to compare their whole continent to the United States just so they feel superior, the EU bosses want to take the European peoples' identities away, doing away with national boundaries and identities, and mashing everyone together into a grey European super-state goo.
Farage says, before the Euorpean Parliament:
"Just who the hell do you think you people are? You are very, very dangerous people indeed. Your obsession with creating this Euro-State means that you’re happy to destroy democracy. You appear to be happy for millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor. Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro-Dream can continue."
He goes on to warn:
"If you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens."
Don't content yourself just to reading my pale transcriptions. Watch, and listen for yourself.
Farage says, before the Euorpean Parliament:
"Just who the hell do you think you people are? You are very, very dangerous people indeed. Your obsession with creating this Euro-State means that you’re happy to destroy democracy. You appear to be happy for millions and millions of people to be unemployed and to be poor. Untold millions must suffer so that your Euro-Dream can continue."
He goes on to warn:
"If you rob people of their identity, if you rob them of their democracy, then all they are left with is nationalism and violence. I can only hope and pray that the euro project is destroyed by the markets before that really happens."
Don't content yourself just to reading my pale transcriptions. Watch, and listen for yourself.
Minute Musings: Two Subjects
Two episodes of Minute Musings go up today. The first one is on the "Bush Tax Cuts" also called the "Bush Era Tax Cuts," as if Bush has an entire era devoted to him like the Victorian or the Edwardian eras. The Bush tax cuts are NOT tax cuts. They were tax cuts only the first year they were introduced, after that they became the normal tax rate. Letting them expire is not letting tax cuts expire, it will be the largest tax increase in history (so says the Heritage Foundation, among others).
Some people think that taxing the rich will increase tax revenue, but the rich can just put their money in secret Swiss bank accounts and other tax shelters and pull out of the economy, so increasing taxes won't hurt them. Do you really think Warren Buffet or George Soros or other super rich people (mostly men) ever pay taxes, or do they find slimy underhanded ways around having to pay taxes, like starting ficticious charity organizations and donating to them? It worked for Howard Hughes. He started the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1953 to avoid having to give his vast fortune to anyone when he died. He created HHMI as a ficticious charity organization, which eventually became a real charity organization years after his death.
Wasn't it John Kennedy who cut taxes for the top income class and increased total tax revenue? You would think people would actually learn from history, but in a country where 26% of people don't know we won our independence from Britain what kind of history do you expect people to be learning from?
Bush Tax Cuts Video
The second video is about the Charles Rangel censure. Censure is supposedly so bad only 6 representatives have been given this punishment in the past hundred years (5 Democrats and 1 Republican; Democrats make up 16/23 total representatives censured ever, nearly 70%). I expected them to pour water on his face to simulate drowning, but all that happened was the Speaker got up and, nearly in tears, said something like "the House censures you." Then Rangel gave a speech that shows he's as cockey as ever and didn't learn a thing and then he left. That was it? He had a team of lawyers ready to fight this "punishment" and that was it? It was the biggest non-event of 2010.
Rangel Video
Some people think that taxing the rich will increase tax revenue, but the rich can just put their money in secret Swiss bank accounts and other tax shelters and pull out of the economy, so increasing taxes won't hurt them. Do you really think Warren Buffet or George Soros or other super rich people (mostly men) ever pay taxes, or do they find slimy underhanded ways around having to pay taxes, like starting ficticious charity organizations and donating to them? It worked for Howard Hughes. He started the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1953 to avoid having to give his vast fortune to anyone when he died. He created HHMI as a ficticious charity organization, which eventually became a real charity organization years after his death.
Wasn't it John Kennedy who cut taxes for the top income class and increased total tax revenue? You would think people would actually learn from history, but in a country where 26% of people don't know we won our independence from Britain what kind of history do you expect people to be learning from?
Bush Tax Cuts Video
The second video is about the Charles Rangel censure. Censure is supposedly so bad only 6 representatives have been given this punishment in the past hundred years (5 Democrats and 1 Republican; Democrats make up 16/23 total representatives censured ever, nearly 70%). I expected them to pour water on his face to simulate drowning, but all that happened was the Speaker got up and, nearly in tears, said something like "the House censures you." Then Rangel gave a speech that shows he's as cockey as ever and didn't learn a thing and then he left. That was it? He had a team of lawyers ready to fight this "punishment" and that was it? It was the biggest non-event of 2010.
Rangel Video
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Survival of Someone
Everyone who references Phillip Longman's article "Survival of the Godliest" titles thier own critiques "Survival of the Godliest" so I didn't. He writes about the trend of religious people having more children than secular people, so in the future there will be a trend toward more religious people and less secular people. Also, the more religious the person is the more children they have, so more deeply fundamental religious folks have more children than fair weather religious folks, but more on that latter.
Once again we resume our exploration of the topic of the demographic decline of atheism. Modern fundamaterialists of all stripes like to think that we're fucking killing the earf and humans have to go extinct to save the planet. Some like to anthropomorphise the planet, thinking the earf to be their mother goddess. Those who are not dirt worshiping dirt worshipers (when people refer to "mother earth" they mean dirt) are in the Dickey D crowd, folks who think they're better than us and shutter at the fact that they must inhabit the same space-time continuum as us lower forms of life. They don't care about the earth but they are smart enough to use the language of the dirt worshiping dirt worshipers in order to get the dirt worshiping dirt worshipers to join forces with them against their religious enemies.
Not too long ago I got into an argument with someone who may or may not fall into one or both of the above groups. Now, I don't like to get into arguments. They're rarely fun and even rarelyer accomplish anything. I'm more like a reporter. I report things here and then tell you, my valued couple of readers, to go out and do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Often I will give opinions, but more often than not I will admit that more study is needed and we shouldn't jump to conclusions. She used a lot of ten dollar words, said I was mistaking correlation with causation, and that when Muslims move to Europe and secularize their fertility rate drops. Well, big words won't win you an argument, around half the people who take a side on the issue of declining population raise the issue of the decline of secular people and I doubt ALL of them are mistaking correlation with causation (aside from myself and Phillip Longman, Vincent Torely at UD, and secular University of London professor Eric Kaufmann must be mistaking correlation for causation, plus Dean Radin didn't mention any logical mistakes with this argument, though he did question what the world would look like if the trend continues), plus, the argument is that religious people have more children so will outbreed secular people, if Muslims who migrate to Europe SECULARIZE one would expect them to have fewer children if the argument were correct. I'm not trying to make an argument from authority. All the people I've listed fall into the group of humanity, and as a member of that group there is metaphysical certainty that they will be mistaken at least once in their lives. I'm also not trying to make a climate change (hide the decline) type appeal to concensus, which does not exist in science. However, using fancy rhetorical devices won't make the argument go away just because you don't like the implications with regard to your lifestyle choice. Vincent at UD presented a good argument why secular people may still win the demographic battle, due to legislation (some passed, some very easy to pass) that would limit the number of children religious people could have or prevent them from having children in the first place, and those few children they do have, assure that they are given secular indoctrination so secularism survives the demographic decline. On top of that I might suggest that in the future, at the current rate of government expansion, there may come a day when political dissidents (libertarians, fundamentalist religious folks, etc.) may just be rounded up into camps (extraordinary rendition, 110,000 Japanese rounded up during WWII, it's happened before) and exterminated, or at least removed from the breeding population.
Getting back to Longman's article, he writes:
"To be sure, in countries rich and poor, under all forms of government, birth rates are declining across the globe. But they are declining least among those adhering to strict religious codes and literal belief in the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran. Indeed, the pattern of human fertility now fits this pattern: the least likely to procreate are those who profess no believe in God; those who describe themselves as agnostic or simply spiritual are only somewhat slightly less likely to be childless. Moving up the spectrum, family size increases among practicing Unitarians, Reform Jews, mainline Protestants and “cafeteria” Catholics, but the birthrates found in these populations are still far below replacement levels. Only as we approach the realm of religious belief and practice marked by an intensity we might call, for lack of a better word, “fundamentalism,” do we find pockets of high fertility and consequent rapid population growth."
If you're wondering where the Urban Mystic falls on that scale, well, I'm wondering too. At the present moment it's best to let Longman do the talking.
"When confronted with the fact that they are being outbred, secularists often respond that many if not most children born into highly religious families will grow up to reject the faith of their fathers — such is the assumed allure of freedom and individuality....Arguing against this proposition, however, are some stubborn demographic facts. Among fundamentalist families, it turns out, the apple does not fall far from the tree. And the more demanding the faith, the more this rule applies."
According to Eric Kaufmann's new book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, Darwin explains why secular people will be much fewer and farther between in the future and the religious shall greatly multiply.
"In a world in which childbearing is rarely accidental and almost never rewarding economically, birthrates increasingly reflect values choices. And so, by Darwinian process, those who adhere to traditions that preserve and celebrate the ancient injunction to “go forth and multiply” wind up putting more of their genes and ideas into the future than those who don’t. As Kaufmann shows, fertility, over time, plays out like compound interest. That is, even if religiously fundamentalist families only have a few more children than secular or religiously moderate counterparts, and they can keep those children holding on to fundamentalist faith and values (especially related to child-bearing), the passage of generations will greatly magnify their numbers and influence. Similarly, secularists and others who choose to have only one or two children, and who pass those values on to their children, will, over time, see their population decline precipitously."
Will religious people inherit the earth? Will secular people go extinct? I will say this only once, so pay attention: I don't know.
I am NOT an unbiased observer. There are few such people, maybe none. I do have a stake in the matter, and you may as well. I can only present to you the information that I am given and then ask that you draw your own conclusions.
-Dee
Once again we resume our exploration of the topic of the demographic decline of atheism. Modern fundamaterialists of all stripes like to think that we're fucking killing the earf and humans have to go extinct to save the planet. Some like to anthropomorphise the planet, thinking the earf to be their mother goddess. Those who are not dirt worshiping dirt worshipers (when people refer to "mother earth" they mean dirt) are in the Dickey D crowd, folks who think they're better than us and shutter at the fact that they must inhabit the same space-time continuum as us lower forms of life. They don't care about the earth but they are smart enough to use the language of the dirt worshiping dirt worshipers in order to get the dirt worshiping dirt worshipers to join forces with them against their religious enemies.
Not too long ago I got into an argument with someone who may or may not fall into one or both of the above groups. Now, I don't like to get into arguments. They're rarely fun and even rarelyer accomplish anything. I'm more like a reporter. I report things here and then tell you, my valued couple of readers, to go out and do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Often I will give opinions, but more often than not I will admit that more study is needed and we shouldn't jump to conclusions. She used a lot of ten dollar words, said I was mistaking correlation with causation, and that when Muslims move to Europe and secularize their fertility rate drops. Well, big words won't win you an argument, around half the people who take a side on the issue of declining population raise the issue of the decline of secular people and I doubt ALL of them are mistaking correlation with causation (aside from myself and Phillip Longman, Vincent Torely at UD, and secular University of London professor Eric Kaufmann must be mistaking correlation for causation, plus Dean Radin didn't mention any logical mistakes with this argument, though he did question what the world would look like if the trend continues), plus, the argument is that religious people have more children so will outbreed secular people, if Muslims who migrate to Europe SECULARIZE one would expect them to have fewer children if the argument were correct. I'm not trying to make an argument from authority. All the people I've listed fall into the group of humanity, and as a member of that group there is metaphysical certainty that they will be mistaken at least once in their lives. I'm also not trying to make a climate change (hide the decline) type appeal to concensus, which does not exist in science. However, using fancy rhetorical devices won't make the argument go away just because you don't like the implications with regard to your lifestyle choice. Vincent at UD presented a good argument why secular people may still win the demographic battle, due to legislation (some passed, some very easy to pass) that would limit the number of children religious people could have or prevent them from having children in the first place, and those few children they do have, assure that they are given secular indoctrination so secularism survives the demographic decline. On top of that I might suggest that in the future, at the current rate of government expansion, there may come a day when political dissidents (libertarians, fundamentalist religious folks, etc.) may just be rounded up into camps (extraordinary rendition, 110,000 Japanese rounded up during WWII, it's happened before) and exterminated, or at least removed from the breeding population.
Getting back to Longman's article, he writes:
"To be sure, in countries rich and poor, under all forms of government, birth rates are declining across the globe. But they are declining least among those adhering to strict religious codes and literal belief in the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran. Indeed, the pattern of human fertility now fits this pattern: the least likely to procreate are those who profess no believe in God; those who describe themselves as agnostic or simply spiritual are only somewhat slightly less likely to be childless. Moving up the spectrum, family size increases among practicing Unitarians, Reform Jews, mainline Protestants and “cafeteria” Catholics, but the birthrates found in these populations are still far below replacement levels. Only as we approach the realm of religious belief and practice marked by an intensity we might call, for lack of a better word, “fundamentalism,” do we find pockets of high fertility and consequent rapid population growth."
If you're wondering where the Urban Mystic falls on that scale, well, I'm wondering too. At the present moment it's best to let Longman do the talking.
"When confronted with the fact that they are being outbred, secularists often respond that many if not most children born into highly religious families will grow up to reject the faith of their fathers — such is the assumed allure of freedom and individuality....Arguing against this proposition, however, are some stubborn demographic facts. Among fundamentalist families, it turns out, the apple does not fall far from the tree. And the more demanding the faith, the more this rule applies."
According to Eric Kaufmann's new book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, Darwin explains why secular people will be much fewer and farther between in the future and the religious shall greatly multiply.
"In a world in which childbearing is rarely accidental and almost never rewarding economically, birthrates increasingly reflect values choices. And so, by Darwinian process, those who adhere to traditions that preserve and celebrate the ancient injunction to “go forth and multiply” wind up putting more of their genes and ideas into the future than those who don’t. As Kaufmann shows, fertility, over time, plays out like compound interest. That is, even if religiously fundamentalist families only have a few more children than secular or religiously moderate counterparts, and they can keep those children holding on to fundamentalist faith and values (especially related to child-bearing), the passage of generations will greatly magnify their numbers and influence. Similarly, secularists and others who choose to have only one or two children, and who pass those values on to their children, will, over time, see their population decline precipitously."
Will religious people inherit the earth? Will secular people go extinct? I will say this only once, so pay attention: I don't know.
I am NOT an unbiased observer. There are few such people, maybe none. I do have a stake in the matter, and you may as well. I can only present to you the information that I am given and then ask that you draw your own conclusions.
-Dee
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Balking Someone
Up on The Procrustean we see a piece on Roger Penrose's new aeons of time cosmology, which I alluded to in Georg Cantor's Infinities Part Two. Basically here's what aeons of time is:
"after all the matter in the universe is swallowed up by black holes, and after they evapourate leaving behind nothing but photons, everything gets bigger and somehow the universe starts over again, forever."
Using data from sophisticated equipment, Penrose has claimed to have found irregularities in the CMB (cosmic microwave background) that could only be produced if his aeons of time cosmology were correct. However, the supporters of the various inflationary models also claim the data corresponds to precisely what would be expected if inflation occurred. Since the aeons of time and cosmic inflation are incompatable one or both of them has to be wrong (about the data found in the CMB and in general).
After reporting this, Rob at The Procrustean then makes a conclusion about Penrose, inflation, and intelligent design. He says (this whole issue is a bit of a head scratcher for me so I'll just point you in the right direction and let you figure this out for yourself):
"Neither Sir Roger nor the conventional inflationary models have made solid predictions. At best, they can be tweaked to some, but not all aspects of the data. They possess far too many adjustable parameters drawn from some sort of metaphysical repository of models that is itself questionable. Sir Roger attempts to address the metaphysical problem with Creation, and inflationary models address the metaphysical problem of contingency. Neither is particularly convincing. (And a closer look at CCC theory raise more questions about the infinite pressure of dark energy, the rescaling time, the supposed decay of protons and electrons, etc.)
"Which may mean that it is time to assess the situation. Some of the best minds of two generations have addressed cosmology since the discovery of the 3-degree blackbody CMB radiation and not found solutions to the twin problems of a necessary Creator and a necessary Design. Given their failure, and I do mean abject failure to find anything beyond a metaphysical black box with lots of dials, I would suggest that we claim support for the contrary. All of them have put the cart before the horse, trying to create a no-beginning-no-design theory by massaging the data, post-dicting their data to support their theory, and still have not succeeded, thereby proving the very thing they did not want to prove."
I'm not so sure I would jump from Penrose and inflation being wrong to the alternative being correct, but it does give one something to think about.
-Dee
"after all the matter in the universe is swallowed up by black holes, and after they evapourate leaving behind nothing but photons, everything gets bigger and somehow the universe starts over again, forever."
Using data from sophisticated equipment, Penrose has claimed to have found irregularities in the CMB (cosmic microwave background) that could only be produced if his aeons of time cosmology were correct. However, the supporters of the various inflationary models also claim the data corresponds to precisely what would be expected if inflation occurred. Since the aeons of time and cosmic inflation are incompatable one or both of them has to be wrong (about the data found in the CMB and in general).
After reporting this, Rob at The Procrustean then makes a conclusion about Penrose, inflation, and intelligent design. He says (this whole issue is a bit of a head scratcher for me so I'll just point you in the right direction and let you figure this out for yourself):
"Neither Sir Roger nor the conventional inflationary models have made solid predictions. At best, they can be tweaked to some, but not all aspects of the data. They possess far too many adjustable parameters drawn from some sort of metaphysical repository of models that is itself questionable. Sir Roger attempts to address the metaphysical problem with Creation, and inflationary models address the metaphysical problem of contingency. Neither is particularly convincing. (And a closer look at CCC theory raise more questions about the infinite pressure of dark energy, the rescaling time, the supposed decay of protons and electrons, etc.)
"Which may mean that it is time to assess the situation. Some of the best minds of two generations have addressed cosmology since the discovery of the 3-degree blackbody CMB radiation and not found solutions to the twin problems of a necessary Creator and a necessary Design. Given their failure, and I do mean abject failure to find anything beyond a metaphysical black box with lots of dials, I would suggest that we claim support for the contrary. All of them have put the cart before the horse, trying to create a no-beginning-no-design theory by massaging the data, post-dicting their data to support their theory, and still have not succeeded, thereby proving the very thing they did not want to prove."
I'm not so sure I would jump from Penrose and inflation being wrong to the alternative being correct, but it does give one something to think about.
-Dee
Sunday, November 21, 2010
A House of Cards Built in Midair
The pseudoscience of psychiatry is practically the seventh topic I investigate, though I rarely say anything, except to the radio. Every time someone on the radio tries to sell drugs, or the "central dogma" of psychiatry, that mental disorder = brain disorder and that chemical imbalances in the brain are the cause instead of the effect blood shoots out of my eyes and I start yelling at the radio. I have admonished friends to throw their drugs away and stop listening to these quacks who want to steal their money and ruin their lives. Psychiatry is a complete fraud, fueled by drug companies, and is a $2 trillion a year industry. Psychiatry is not based on science and has, to date, never cured a single person, although it has killed millions. Psychiatry is based on voting and concensus, which is the complet opposite of real science, which is based on gathering evidence and testing hypotheses (sound familiar? Climate change (hide the decline) is also based on concensus). Here are four videos where psychiatrists break the bond of silence and reveal the lies of psychiatry.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The Human Brain
From cnet news comes a story about the human brain. Well, it's really a mouse brain that was experimented on, and not even a real mouse, a chimera created by combining DNA from a mouse and a jelly fish.
In the story we learn that "A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies."
Not only are there hundreds of trillions of synapses, but each synapse has around 1,000 "molecular-scale switches," more than all the computers on earth. Once again we are shown how the human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and that the ideas certain people ("transhumanists" and such) entertain regarding the possibility, or certainty, of artificial intelligence, or of downloading minds onto computers, are patently absurd.
The story also included a video where some scientists used new imaging technology to view the workings of the chimera neurons.
In the story we learn that "A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies."
Not only are there hundreds of trillions of synapses, but each synapse has around 1,000 "molecular-scale switches," more than all the computers on earth. Once again we are shown how the human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and that the ideas certain people ("transhumanists" and such) entertain regarding the possibility, or certainty, of artificial intelligence, or of downloading minds onto computers, are patently absurd.
The story also included a video where some scientists used new imaging technology to view the workings of the chimera neurons.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
More On Climate Change (Say It Fast)
Here are a couple of more links from the pit of perpetual ignorance that is the list of stories I have to get through and report on here. The first one provides a lovely graph created by Cliff Harris and Randy Mann (no relation to Michael Mann of "hide the decline" fame). The graph clearly demonstrates three facts: 1, that global temperatures have been decreasing since 1998, 2, that there have been at least two periods in the past 4500 years where the global temperature was significantly higher than today, and 3, that global temperature seems to be following a regular hot/cold cycle (it appears to be roughly 1000 years). The graph will be posted at the bottom to save space.
The second site talks about the cooling trend as well, and mentions that because climate stations that were once in fields are now on tarmacs and near heat vents of course temperatures will appear to have gone up, even though when you compensate for the piss poor placement of the stations the decline is obvious.
The story goes on to detail the possibility of a coming ice age, since there is a cooling trend going on right now, and since ice ages tend to occur every 11,500 years and the last one did end 12,000 years ago, and the fact that several glaciers are growing at an incredible rate (in Argentina and Antarctica, especially).
The second site talks about the cooling trend as well, and mentions that because climate stations that were once in fields are now on tarmacs and near heat vents of course temperatures will appear to have gone up, even though when you compensate for the piss poor placement of the stations the decline is obvious.
The story goes on to detail the possibility of a coming ice age, since there is a cooling trend going on right now, and since ice ages tend to occur every 11,500 years and the last one did end 12,000 years ago, and the fact that several glaciers are growing at an incredible rate (in Argentina and Antarctica, especially).
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Global Warming Good For Forests
From UD comes a piece regarding global, oops, I mean climate change (hide the decline), and how it INCREASED biodiversity in the Amazon. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which happened 55.8 million years ago was one of the quickest and most dramatic increases in global temperature in the past 65 million years. The PETM can be seen at the highest point on this chart. In contrast the past million years, where we are now, is by a significant margin the coldest point on the chart. We're living in the coldest time in the past 65 million years!
Here's another chart of the past five million years. An unmistakable downward trend is visible in global temperature. Even if we warm the planet up like Algore and Michael Mann warn, there's no way we could possibly warm the earf up to pre five million years ago temperatures or enough to thaw Antarctica and flood the world.
The PETM saw a five degree C temperature increase and 2.5 times the atmospheric CO2 as we have today, and yet, much to the surprise of the global, climate change (hide the decline) believing scientists, who thought all life on earf should have burst into flames and tell tale evidence of SUVs and coal plants being the culprit, they found that biodiversity increased by a lot. In fact, whole families of plants appeared that hadn't been around before.
"Although some plant species disappeared, many more new species arose. That included entire families, suggesting that the increased temperatures and carbon dioxide levels actually boosted bidiversity. 'What we found was exactly the opposite of what we were expecting,' says Jaramillo."
Previous laboratory experiments have demonstrated that plants grow faster and larger in warmer, wetter, environments with more atmospheric CO2 (up to 4 times the levels today). Anyone but a carbon credit peddler can see that.
In fact, Jaramillo catches on after his study. He realizes that "deforestation is the real enemy, not the increase in temperature and carbon dioxide." Because the tropical rainforests lie within the poorest countries on the planet, and carbon credit peddlers like Algore don't want them to use their vast supplies of coal and oil to industrialize and produce nitrogen fertilizer and wipe out Malaria, the poor farmers have to slash and burn whole virgin forests. The poor farmers have to completely rape the land to plant one crop season, then the rain washes away the nutrients, turning the area to desert, and the farmers have to go and rape another forest to get one more crop. If we just stopped believing in climate change and started helping these people climb out of poverty we can fix the deforestation problem quickly and inexpensively. Poverty is the greatest threat to the environment, not SUVs or coal plants. Industrialized countries can afford to conserve the environment, whereas poor countries have to destroy the land just to survive.
-Dee
(Both charts created by Robert A. Rohde, and I'm supposed to say he does not necessarily endorse anything on The Urban Mystic)|
Here's another chart of the past five million years. An unmistakable downward trend is visible in global temperature. Even if we warm the planet up like Algore and Michael Mann warn, there's no way we could possibly warm the earf up to pre five million years ago temperatures or enough to thaw Antarctica and flood the world.
The PETM saw a five degree C temperature increase and 2.5 times the atmospheric CO2 as we have today, and yet, much to the surprise of the global, climate change (hide the decline) believing scientists, who thought all life on earf should have burst into flames and tell tale evidence of SUVs and coal plants being the culprit, they found that biodiversity increased by a lot. In fact, whole families of plants appeared that hadn't been around before.
"Although some plant species disappeared, many more new species arose. That included entire families, suggesting that the increased temperatures and carbon dioxide levels actually boosted bidiversity. 'What we found was exactly the opposite of what we were expecting,' says Jaramillo."
Previous laboratory experiments have demonstrated that plants grow faster and larger in warmer, wetter, environments with more atmospheric CO2 (up to 4 times the levels today). Anyone but a carbon credit peddler can see that.
In fact, Jaramillo catches on after his study. He realizes that "deforestation is the real enemy, not the increase in temperature and carbon dioxide." Because the tropical rainforests lie within the poorest countries on the planet, and carbon credit peddlers like Algore don't want them to use their vast supplies of coal and oil to industrialize and produce nitrogen fertilizer and wipe out Malaria, the poor farmers have to slash and burn whole virgin forests. The poor farmers have to completely rape the land to plant one crop season, then the rain washes away the nutrients, turning the area to desert, and the farmers have to go and rape another forest to get one more crop. If we just stopped believing in climate change and started helping these people climb out of poverty we can fix the deforestation problem quickly and inexpensively. Poverty is the greatest threat to the environment, not SUVs or coal plants. Industrialized countries can afford to conserve the environment, whereas poor countries have to destroy the land just to survive.
-Dee
(Both charts created by Robert A. Rohde, and I'm supposed to say he does not necessarily endorse anything on The Urban Mystic)|
Monday, November 15, 2010
Unstoppable
I've recently seen the film Unstoppable, about a runaway train and inspired by actual events. Directed by Tony Scott, who has a thing for films about trains, Unstoppable is the story of a jackass mistake that sets a rather long train carrying several tanks of deadly poison speeding down the tracks in rural Pennsylvania with no one at the controls. The train is going so fast that it won't be able to make a sharp turn in a major city. The train will derail and release the toxic chemicals, killing tens of thousands of people. The railroad people throw everything they've got at it and nothing works, so a veteran engineer and a rookie conductor, whose families happen to live in the target city, come up with a dramatic plan to stop the train or die trying, just like REAL heroes (not anti-heroes, vigilantes, or some sort of grey area villains).
This is the best film I've seen in a long time (and the only one I've seen in 2010; the last time I went out to see a film was 1 November 2009, Law Abiding Citizen, which was the only one I saw in 2009). I highly recommend seeing Unstoppable.
Unstoppable Trailer
Unstoppable is based on the real life incident involving the CSX 8888 "Crazy Eights," which was carrying poisonous phenol (though not nearly as much), and did travel under power with no one at the controls in rural Ohio in 2001. Crazy Eights chugged along for three hours before a similar plan was used to bring it to a stop before the train derailed. Like in the film, all the other attempts, such as using a portable derailer and police shooting at the fuel shut release valve, failed. While elements of the story are exaggerated for dramatic effect, Unstoppalble is not a documentary. It does, however, portray the actual events closely enough to merrit the "Inspired by True Events" tag proudly displayed on the poster and at the beginning of the film.
News Footage of The Real Train
-Dee
This is the best film I've seen in a long time (and the only one I've seen in 2010; the last time I went out to see a film was 1 November 2009, Law Abiding Citizen, which was the only one I saw in 2009). I highly recommend seeing Unstoppable.
Unstoppable Trailer
Unstoppable is based on the real life incident involving the CSX 8888 "Crazy Eights," which was carrying poisonous phenol (though not nearly as much), and did travel under power with no one at the controls in rural Ohio in 2001. Crazy Eights chugged along for three hours before a similar plan was used to bring it to a stop before the train derailed. Like in the film, all the other attempts, such as using a portable derailer and police shooting at the fuel shut release valve, failed. While elements of the story are exaggerated for dramatic effect, Unstoppalble is not a documentary. It does, however, portray the actual events closely enough to merrit the "Inspired by True Events" tag proudly displayed on the poster and at the beginning of the film.
News Footage of The Real Train
-Dee
Saturday, November 13, 2010
I'm A Skeptic
From Entangled Minds (from Xtranormal.com) comes a five minute video in which a self-proclaimed skeptic from the 1980s approaches an attractive scientist (as attractive as a computer generated image can be I guess) and they have a discussion about what is and is not science. The self-proclaimed skeptic (skep-dick as they are referred to on The Urban Mystic) talks about how folks like him make proclamations from preconcieved beliefs about what is and is not real. The scientist, like Ken Wilber did in his deep science video, explains that there is a scientific method and that experiments need to be conducted and theories revised. Science, unlike skep-dick-ism (or fundamaterialism), does not start with the conclusion and work its way back using circular reasoning. Science is open-ended and willing to change based on new data.
"I'm A Skeptic" video
Ken Wilber on deep science
Also, Daniel Drasin's "Zen and the Art of Debunkery" has just been updated for 2010. The link on the official Irked-Confusion site will have to be changed now.
"I'm A Skeptic" video
Ken Wilber on deep science
Also, Daniel Drasin's "Zen and the Art of Debunkery" has just been updated for 2010. The link on the official Irked-Confusion site will have to be changed now.
Georg Cantor's Infinities (Part Two)
Continuing the last post on Cantor and how he overturned the entire world, this story comes from UD and is called "Infinitely Wrong."
Cantor demonstrated that some infinities are bigger than others (infinitely so). Robert Sheldon, in the post linked above, attempts to demonstrate that cardinality can be used to show how the multiverse can't save Darwinism.
As Roger Penrose pointed out, in order to avoid conflicting with the second law of thermodynamics, the Big Bang had to be insanely precise. According to Penrose (who now believes that after all the matter in the universe is swallowed up by black holes, and after they evapourate leaving behind nothing but photons, everything gets bigger and somehow the universe starts over again, forever, but that's a different story), the force causing the expansion of the universe has to match the force of gravity to at least one part in 10^(10^123) or the universe would have either exploded into nothing or collapsed back right after it banged. I'm not sure just how many zeroes are in that number, but think of it like this: if the universe had one more or one less proton (or probably less mass than that) at the Big Bang it wouldn't be here right now for us to talk about (or me to bore you about). Hawking, who was balked in September, places the ratio at a more reasonable one part in 10^60.
The Hawking solution to this seemingly fine-tuned feature? Infinite time + infinite space. Hawking et al. propose universes popping into existence all the time in their bubble multiverse. With infinite universes being created in a process that has infinite duration anything that can happen will happen, no matter how improbable, including gravity matching the expansion of the universe to that whole stack of tens. However, at least one part in 10^(10^123) does not mean that the fine-tuning is exactly that precise, just that that is the minimum precision of the fine-tuning. It could be more. It could even be infinite.
To deal with this, according to Sheldon, the anti-design folks ask Hugh Everett for help with creating infinitely more universes. Doing some fancy mathematics, if I'm reading it right, the anti-design folks can get an Aleph-naught infinite number of universes out of their quantum fudgery to solve a design problem with an Aleph-one cardinality, something that is impossible because the fine-tuning is now infinitely larger than the attempts at explaining it away by chance.
So, if all that made sense to you, it should have clearly been demonstrated that an infinite multiverse cannot solve the problem caused by the fine-tuning of the physical constants.
-Dee
Cantor demonstrated that some infinities are bigger than others (infinitely so). Robert Sheldon, in the post linked above, attempts to demonstrate that cardinality can be used to show how the multiverse can't save Darwinism.
As Roger Penrose pointed out, in order to avoid conflicting with the second law of thermodynamics, the Big Bang had to be insanely precise. According to Penrose (who now believes that after all the matter in the universe is swallowed up by black holes, and after they evapourate leaving behind nothing but photons, everything gets bigger and somehow the universe starts over again, forever, but that's a different story), the force causing the expansion of the universe has to match the force of gravity to at least one part in 10^(10^123) or the universe would have either exploded into nothing or collapsed back right after it banged. I'm not sure just how many zeroes are in that number, but think of it like this: if the universe had one more or one less proton (or probably less mass than that) at the Big Bang it wouldn't be here right now for us to talk about (or me to bore you about). Hawking, who was balked in September, places the ratio at a more reasonable one part in 10^60.
The Hawking solution to this seemingly fine-tuned feature? Infinite time + infinite space. Hawking et al. propose universes popping into existence all the time in their bubble multiverse. With infinite universes being created in a process that has infinite duration anything that can happen will happen, no matter how improbable, including gravity matching the expansion of the universe to that whole stack of tens. However, at least one part in 10^(10^123) does not mean that the fine-tuning is exactly that precise, just that that is the minimum precision of the fine-tuning. It could be more. It could even be infinite.
To deal with this, according to Sheldon, the anti-design folks ask Hugh Everett for help with creating infinitely more universes. Doing some fancy mathematics, if I'm reading it right, the anti-design folks can get an Aleph-naught infinite number of universes out of their quantum fudgery to solve a design problem with an Aleph-one cardinality, something that is impossible because the fine-tuning is now infinitely larger than the attempts at explaining it away by chance.
So, if all that made sense to you, it should have clearly been demonstrated that an infinite multiverse cannot solve the problem caused by the fine-tuning of the physical constants.
-Dee
Friday, November 12, 2010
Bush and Kanye West
Remember how for eight years Bush was the enemy, and Hitler, and the Devil? Now, folks like Oprah and gay fish Kanye West are getting chummy with him? It's more than a little bit suspicious. It's almost as if that whole Bush was evil thing was an act, like someone is ordering us to dance and we gladly play along with this game. Who do you think that is, pulling the strings, making us dance, telling us to hate Bush, and making us elect a president who continues all of his bad policies?
Thursday, November 11, 2010
European Depopulation
Member of the European Parliment Daniel Hannan addresses the Parliment (which is always mysteriously empty) regarding an issue that has been mentioned here several times, the looming demographic collapse of the world. In this video, Mr. Hannan warns that the population of Europe will decline by 100 million over the next 40 years, and there's nothing that anyone can do to prevent that catastrophe. What is the cause of this problem, which he asserts should be the top priority of the European Parliment? Among other things, it is the ever increasing nanny-state governments in the western world.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Wonderful Story from France
From AFP comes a wonderful piece about a toddler who fell out a window in France and survived.
The story begins:
"An 18-month-old boy survived after falling seven floors and bouncing off a Paris cafe awning into the arms of a passer-by, witnesses said Tuesday."
The man, Philippe Bensignor, caught the boy who fell out the window!
After the several negative posts and the seemingly endless parade of bad news this story, that was sitting in my in box for quite some time before I read it, and then read it again, really moved me. There's a lot of crap in the world, and I mean a whole lot, but there are events like this that make it all worth it. Enjoy this story.
-Dee
The story begins:
"An 18-month-old boy survived after falling seven floors and bouncing off a Paris cafe awning into the arms of a passer-by, witnesses said Tuesday."
The man, Philippe Bensignor, caught the boy who fell out the window!
After the several negative posts and the seemingly endless parade of bad news this story, that was sitting in my in box for quite some time before I read it, and then read it again, really moved me. There's a lot of crap in the world, and I mean a whole lot, but there are events like this that make it all worth it. Enjoy this story.
-Dee
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
The Biggest Scam In The Whole Wide World
The vjtorley article on UD segues into how the multiverse and creationism has something to do with global warming, oops, can't call it that anymore since, well, the globe hasn't warmed since 1998. They're calling it climate change now. Either way, according to Richard Sandor, head of the Chicago Climate Exchange, it's a ten trillion dollar a year industry for carbon offset businesses ($10,000,000,000,000, or 15 times the US defense budget, 73% of the National Debt, or 70% of THE TOTAL US GDP!).
I hadn't finished reading the article, or even finished writing about it when I knew I had to do something about the Chicago Climate Exchange scam, what I have dubbed, "The Biggest Scam in the Whole Wide World." Goldman Sachs owns 50% of the CCX. Yes, that Goldman Sachs, that sold the shitty deals that destroyed the world economy. Who also owns CCX? Algore! Who would have guessed? The man who has been selling the idea of global, oops, climate change since 2000 and even won the Nobel Prize for making a fucking slide show, instead of Irena Sendler, who saved thousands of children from Nazi death camps, stands to profit enormously from crap and tax legislation! What a coincidence! Here's two videos in a series in which this whole thing is unraveled.
I hadn't finished reading the article, or even finished writing about it when I knew I had to do something about the Chicago Climate Exchange scam, what I have dubbed, "The Biggest Scam in the Whole Wide World." Goldman Sachs owns 50% of the CCX. Yes, that Goldman Sachs, that sold the shitty deals that destroyed the world economy. Who also owns CCX? Algore! Who would have guessed? The man who has been selling the idea of global, oops, climate change since 2000 and even won the Nobel Prize for making a fucking slide show, instead of Irena Sendler, who saved thousands of children from Nazi death camps, stands to profit enormously from crap and tax legislation! What a coincidence! Here's two videos in a series in which this whole thing is unraveled.
Why The Multiverse Is A Disaster For Atheists
Vjtorley, UD contributor, has written an enormous thing about an article that explains how it is consistant to be a young earth creationist and still have millions of years old stars. In it he says that invoking a multiverse, a scenario in which there are an infinite number of "universes" in which everything that can happen does happen, does not disprove the existence of God. The number of universes where everything was created in 6,000 years is infinitely greater than the number of 13.7 billion year old universes. When you're dealing with infinities, the number of nonparsimonious universes is infinitely larger than the number of parsimonious universes, so the likely hood that we inhabit a nonparsimonious universe, like say one that's 6,000 years old yet has seemingly billion year old stars, is infinitely greater than the likelihood we inhabit a parsimonious universe. When you deal with infinities you have to throw parsimony out the window. Also, having a multiverse that's been around for 6,000 years yet still has infinitely many universes that were all created 6,000 years ago still has that pesky infinity problem to get around.
The whole UD piece is monstrously long and involves many more points than I could possibly add to this summary, so I'll just skip to the end: "I conclude that a skeptic who wishes to deny the reality of God by positing a multiverse containing an infinite number of universes is engaging in scientific and intellectual suicide. Such a skeptic no longer has a reason to believe in a 13.7 billion-year-old universe which unfolded in an orderly fashion, without any changes in either the laws of Nature or the constants of Nature. Indeed, the multiverse destroys the skeptic’s arguments against a 6,000-year-old universe. And finally, the multiverse fails to rule out God anyway – for you could always say that God created it." (bold and italics in original)
-Dee
The whole UD piece is monstrously long and involves many more points than I could possibly add to this summary, so I'll just skip to the end: "I conclude that a skeptic who wishes to deny the reality of God by positing a multiverse containing an infinite number of universes is engaging in scientific and intellectual suicide. Such a skeptic no longer has a reason to believe in a 13.7 billion-year-old universe which unfolded in an orderly fashion, without any changes in either the laws of Nature or the constants of Nature. Indeed, the multiverse destroys the skeptic’s arguments against a 6,000-year-old universe. And finally, the multiverse fails to rule out God anyway – for you could always say that God created it." (bold and italics in original)
-Dee
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Thomas Paine - Flaming Hypocrite Part Deux
With the excruciating conclusion of Common Sense comes the dramatic conclusion to this video series. I show how "Holland" and Switzerland, two "republics" which have not known war in the past century were not republics and had known tons of war in the past century.
The whole time making this it was all I could do not to be overcome by the stench of feet.
I quote from A Brief Survey of Swiss History.
The whole time making this it was all I could do not to be overcome by the stench of feet.
I quote from A Brief Survey of Swiss History.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Georg Cantor's Infinities (Part One)
From Uncommon Descent comes a wonderful video linked to by a poster bornagain77 (the one known for posting many thousands of words in the comments section). In the video very British people explain the history of infinity, Georg Cantor, and how he overturned the world.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Thomas Paine - Flaming Hypocrite
Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" contains little if any common sense. What it does contain are self-defeating arguments and flaming hypocricy. After getting through section 1 and half of section 2 I had to stop to deconstruct Paine before going mad.
Paine wrote "Common Sense" like a sermon, quoting the Bible in an attempt to win people over to his side of the argument. This is beyond ironic as Paine believed the Bible was a book of fairy stories and that Jesus was created from a Roman sun god as a political move by the Popes to gain control of the ignorant masses.
Someone PLEASE tell me how Common Sense became a best seller in its time and why Paine is a clut icon for the political right?
Paine wrote "Common Sense" like a sermon, quoting the Bible in an attempt to win people over to his side of the argument. This is beyond ironic as Paine believed the Bible was a book of fairy stories and that Jesus was created from a Roman sun god as a political move by the Popes to gain control of the ignorant masses.
Someone PLEASE tell me how Common Sense became a best seller in its time and why Paine is a clut icon for the political right?
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Great Winter of 2010
During my meditation last night I had a precognitive experience that later proved true (ten minutes later to be exact). This got me thinking about a topic I have wanted to post for a while but never got around to. I had two powerful precogs in February 2006, around the time many miracles were happening and I got involved on the path of the mystics. The first one, 24 February, came to me in hypnonogogic sleep. I saw two men attacking an oil refinery in a desert and on that same day there was just such an attack in Saudi Arabia. At the time I posted it on the original Urban Mystic (now taken down). On 22 February I had another experience that hasn't come true yet, but the time it described is rapidly approaching.
(From my notes) I was reading a book when I saw the Morph strongly on its pages. It was like water sheeting down from the top of the book to the bottom. After a few seconds I felt compelled to close my eyes. Scrolling across from right to left were newspaper headlines. I don't remember the first one but the second one read: "CERN, Great Winter of 2010." What follows is a bit sketchy but it was something like "Discovery - Soul."
What I take from this is at least two things.
1. There will be a big story out of CERN in the Winter of 2010 (December), possibly an important discovery.
2. The Winter will be very bad, so bad in fact it will be called the "Great Winter of 2010."
It's also possible that there's some important discovery regarding the existence of the soul or survival of consciousness. I know there's that AWARE study going on; maybe the results are going to be really good.
-Dee|
(From my notes) I was reading a book when I saw the Morph strongly on its pages. It was like water sheeting down from the top of the book to the bottom. After a few seconds I felt compelled to close my eyes. Scrolling across from right to left were newspaper headlines. I don't remember the first one but the second one read: "CERN, Great Winter of 2010." What follows is a bit sketchy but it was something like "Discovery - Soul."
What I take from this is at least two things.
1. There will be a big story out of CERN in the Winter of 2010 (December), possibly an important discovery.
2. The Winter will be very bad, so bad in fact it will be called the "Great Winter of 2010."
It's also possible that there's some important discovery regarding the existence of the soul or survival of consciousness. I know there's that AWARE study going on; maybe the results are going to be really good.
-Dee|
Hundred Greatest Battles Update for November 2010
I have added 14 battles since May, bringing the total now up to 54. I've even created a map (using blank maps provided by the other wiki) and discovered a disturbing trend. Most battles seem centered around northeast France and Greece. Two whole (inhabited) continents, Australia and South America, remain battle free. All the North American battles are located in the United States and the only African battle is in Tunisia. Here is the list so far:
1 Adrianople
2 Agincourt
3 Ankara
4 Antietam
5 Antioch
6 Artemisium
7 Bannockburn
8 Bull Run (Manassas), First Battle
9 Cannae
10 Carrhae
11 Catalaunian Plains
12 Chaeronea
13 Changping
14 Fredericksburg
15 Gaugamela
16 Gettysburg
17 Hastings
18 Hydaspes River
19 Indus
20 Issus
21 Iwo Jima
22 & 23 Mongol Invasions of Japan
24 Jutland
25 Kadesh
26 Kalinga
27 Kazan
28 Kursk
29 & 30 Lexington and Concord
31 Leyte Gulf
32 Malta
33 Marathon
34 Mobei
35 Mohi
36 Passchendaele
37 Persian Gates
38 Pharsalus
39 Plataea
40 Red Cliffs
41 Salamis
42 Salsu
43 Seringapatam
44 Shiloh
45 Somme
46 Talas
47 Telamon
48 Teutoburg Forest
49 Trafalgar
50 Verdun
51 Waterloo
52 Watling Street
53 Yorktown
54 Zama
1 Adrianople
2 Agincourt
3 Ankara
4 Antietam
5 Antioch
6 Artemisium
7 Bannockburn
8 Bull Run (Manassas), First Battle
9 Cannae
10 Carrhae
11 Catalaunian Plains
12 Chaeronea
13 Changping
14 Fredericksburg
15 Gaugamela
16 Gettysburg
17 Hastings
18 Hydaspes River
19 Indus
20 Issus
21 Iwo Jima
22 & 23 Mongol Invasions of Japan
24 Jutland
25 Kadesh
26 Kalinga
27 Kazan
28 Kursk
29 & 30 Lexington and Concord
31 Leyte Gulf
32 Malta
33 Marathon
34 Mobei
35 Mohi
36 Passchendaele
37 Persian Gates
38 Pharsalus
39 Plataea
40 Red Cliffs
41 Salamis
42 Salsu
43 Seringapatam
44 Shiloh
45 Somme
46 Talas
47 Telamon
48 Teutoburg Forest
49 Trafalgar
50 Verdun
51 Waterloo
52 Watling Street
53 Yorktown
54 Zama
Saturday, October 30, 2010
The Myth of Overpopulation
Everyone knows there are too many people and we're fucking killing the earf, right????? That's just what libocrats (liberal aristocrats) want you to believe! The truth is most of the developed world has declining populations. It's estimated that in 50 years Japan will be completely depopulated, and there are already six men in China for ever one woman (mostly because baby girls, seen as undesirable, are left to die and sometimes buried alive). Some countries in eastern Europe are already seeing sharp declines in population. The United States retains a robust population largely due to immigration. Here are two videos (that I didn't make for a change) that explains with stick people the truth about the declining population of Earth.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Oneness & The Heart of the World
Trappist Monk Fr. Thomas Keating discusses Christian mysticism and the mysteries implicite in the oneness of God. He relates the experiences of Christian mysticism with Zen and integral theory. From the official description:
"In this talk, Father Keating discusses the dynamic nature of God and the paradox implicit in experiencing divine oneness. With humor and wisdom, he explores the practice of contemplative prayer, and how we might begin to approach God through being present to our senses." (Length 34:41)
"In this talk, Father Keating discusses the dynamic nature of God and the paradox implicit in experiencing divine oneness. With humor and wisdom, he explores the practice of contemplative prayer, and how we might begin to approach God through being present to our senses." (Length 34:41)
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Juan Williams and NPR
The rich white head of NPR (National Public Radio) sent her goons to fire journalist Juan Williams after he worked there since 1999. They didn't like him because he wasn't their puppet, so they looked for any excuse to fire him, and they did. This act of cowardice was disgusting and disgraceful.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Ken Wilber and Weed
Ken Wilber is naive and believes politicians tell the truth. He also supports "rude boy" cultist Andrew Cohen (pictured above).
If weed were legalized the government could collect $400 billion a year in taxes and pay off both wars in a few years.
The Other Wiki's page on Cohen, the man who supposedly gained complete and final enlightenment in two and a half weeks.
The Other Wiki's page on Cohen's guru, H. W. L. Poonja. He pronounced Cohen's enlightenment after two and a half weeks.
Be Scofield's "Integral Abuse" article on Cohen and evolutionary enlightenment. He asks the brilliant question about Cohen's "rude boy" enlightenment: "But I must ask, if Cohen's tactics are so revolutionary and 'crazy wisdom' is needed to become enlightened, why haven't any of his students become enlightened? And why are these tactics so necessary when neither Cohen or Wilber attribute their awakenings to these sorts of experiences?"
WHAT enlightenment??! - a site where former Cohen devotees vent. May be true, may be lies, I don't know, I didn't read it.
The Urban Mystic versus The Shirtless Spiritual
Geoffrey D. Falk, a man with no kind words to say to anyone (except maybe Ramana Maharshi), has a site that demonstrates that all gurus, no matter how great, are still human, even if they are divine. Warning: Goeff does believe in the Randi prize, even though there is good evidence to suggest it is a fraud and even though so called "skeptics" say that winning the prize would prove nothing. Goeff might be skeptical of gurus but he sure isn't skeptical of his own skepticism. He quotes Randi several times and believes fully the sexual incidents involving Sai Baba, even though every single court case involving Baba was thrown. In one the so called "victims" were brought in and said they had never heard of the man who brought the case to court, had never met him, and had never claimed Baba molested them. The man, a disillusioned Western devotee, made the whole thing up to get back at Baba for giving him a ring with a zircon instead of a real diamond, even though he said it was a "die-mind" ring, not a "diamond" ring (meaning the death of the ego). He also says videos of Baba's miracles reveal sleight of hand when a magician interviewed for Haraldsson's book says the videos are all too poor quality to come to any honest conclusions. He also supports the view of scholars who find spurious homoeroticism in the life and teachings of Ramakrishna, based on bad translations of Bengali into English (Narasingha Sil and Jeffrey Kripal who mistranslate Bengali to English, misunderstand Tantra, and misuse psychoanalysis to do things it was never meant to do). Goeff also seems to have a thing for stories about gurus and blonds (both men and women). Gentlemen may or may not prefer blonds, but according to Goeff all gurus do. Virtually all of the sexual stories involve blonds from exotic lands like the band mates from ABBA. He also quotes Joe Nickell, another skep-dick phony paranormal investigator, and Indian "rationalists" who call themselves "rationalists" even though they are materialists who believe sense perception is the only means of true knowledge, and the original rationalists were people who believed the senses are unreliable and only reason can be used to gain true knowledge, like Descartes and Kant.
In fact, there's a caveat to his book, listed on his website that reads:
The inclusion of any particular individual in Stripping the Gurus is not meant to suggest or imply that he or she represents him- or herself as a guru, nor is it meant to suggest or imply that he or she has indulged in sex, violence, the abuse of others, or any other illegal or immoral activities.
So it all could be false. Most of it probably is.
He is a disillusioned spiritual believer, much like Michael Shermer, which would explain why he's so angry and full of vitriol. He also decorates his site with the anti-religious/secular humanist/utopianist "A" symbol, meaning he's a utopianist/secular humanist/anti-religious do away with others freedom of thought because they're too stupid kind of guy FakeSagan warned about.
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