Top Ten of 2014

 1. Rainbow Rocks

Without question, the undisputed champion of 2014 was the sequel to Equestria Girls. We got a cuteness overload with Sunset Shimmer and Sonata Dusk, some great songs, a couple okay songs, LyraBon shipping, Maud, Trixie trying to hog the spotlight, and human nerd Twilight, among other memorable moments. If you haven't watched it yet I suggest you do. It's only 75 minutes long, you've nothing to lose.



2. The War in Ukraine

The US, through the CIA, is trying to start World War III with Russia by staging a coup in Ukraine and then condemning Russia for acting on behalf of the will of the vast majority of the people in Crimea to rescue them from persecution. I guess the US is the only country allowed to invade other countries on the flimsiest of pretense (Iraq, Libya). NATO wants to encircle Russia and gain control of the natural gas in Ukraine, and floats bogus stories about Russian paramilitary agents blowing up airplanes and Putin shoveling homosexuals into ovens, all in an effort to win over the morons watching cable television to go along with yet another foreign war, this time against an opponent with five thousand city-killing nukes.



3. Feminazism

2014 has been a year where the feminazis have butted heads with just about everyone, but this may be the last gasps of a dying movement. More women are rejecting feminism, amidst a waves of men refusing to marry only to have their money and their children stolen from them by a crooked "justice" system, and the realisation that Western women are the most privileged group of people in the history of the world. The left's anti-intellectualism tries to silence dissenters, such as Norah Vincent and Camille Paglia, but it is only a matter of time before feminism breathes its last. Before that happens expect more asinine spectacles like gamergate and shirtgate.



4. Ebola

The scariest disease in the world is still killing thousands of people in Africa, and the CDC ADMITTED to lying about the number of infected people in the United States, but the hype quickly died down as fads do in the twenty-first century, to the point where people will call you a fearmongerer if you even mention Ebola, and they'll call you a racialist if you talk about the first rule of epidemiology, which is quarantine the infected.



5. Suspicion Regarding Prahlad Jani

The fasting fakir may well be a faker, owing to the fact that a fridge was found in his beautifully appointed apartment. His chelas maintain that he uses it to keep water, his only nourishment. In the absence of further evidence there are really no conclusions we can draw about the curious case of Prahlad Jani.



6. Zen Buddhism in Japan 

Whether we're doing hard time in a Zen monastery or are searching for Buddha in the modern world, you seemed to enjoy these brief excursions into spiritual authenticity.



7. Charlene Cothran Speaks Out

Charlene Cothran, former gay activist and publisher of Venus magazine, exposes the political and pop culture tactics the homosexual lobby uses to try to take over Western civilisation.

 

8. Do It Yourself Dowsing

Francis Hitching, controversial archaeologist and dowser, explains how the practice of detecting underground water might work and provides you with a few experiments you can carry out for yourself to hone this skill.



9. The War Against Cold Fusion

The global elite - bankers, oil companies, greedy politicians, the scientistic establishment - move heaven and earth to kill the ultimate in green energy. Energy independence, the end of global terrorism, cleaning all the pollution in the world, providing cheap, clean water and medicine to people in the third world, all of this is possible through cold fusion. You better believe the billionaires and the military-industrial complex don't want this technology to see the light of day.



10. Dr. Peter Fenwick

Dr. Fenwick explains the near death experience and its implications for medicine and the way we live our lives, and possibly beyond.

What Drives Radical Islam?

Why do all these really hardcore jihadis come from the West? "Jihadi John", the man in all those beheading videos, is from Britain, all the 9/11 terrorists were educated in Western universities. Why? All of a sudden, in a flash of insight, it makes sense. The West is so empty of meaning, so narcissistic, so apathetic, so materialistic, suffused with extreme relativism and leftism that despises religion, despises family, despises community, worships sin. When I see Westerners practice other religions – Hinduism, Buddhism – about 90% seem to me to be fake, empty. Most Christians seem fake, most Jews seem fake, but there are still millions of Westerners who are authentic Christians and Jews, but when they practice other religions it comes across as nothing but feel-good-ism. These people hate Christianity and authentic Western values, the values that led to a few backwater kingdoms in Europe to dominate the entire world in a couple of centuries, to rise above everything all other empires had created, to develop modern science, to develop industry, to delve into the depths of space and microscopic physics, these people hate the values that built all that. They want to get together, to practice "religion" with no strings attached: no sin, no morality aside from progressivism. They're all hippie leftists. Occasionally you'll get a Westerner to adopt religion fully, like Muho Noelke, the German man who became a Zen abbot, but most are just cafeteria style "spiritual but not religious" leftists. Disgusted by the lack of values, the lack of true religion in the West, the men who become jihadis latch onto the one system that promises them the rigor and authenticity they seek: radical Islam. It reaches its hand out to them, beckoning them to kill the Western world that has embraced everything they despise. Ken Wilber says that these people reject modernity, but they don't, they reject boomeritis, they reject the diseased version of modernity, not the healthy version of modernity that existed up until the 1950s. To defeat Jihad we need a rebirth of religion in the West. No military solution will do. Bombing jihadis will solve the problem for now, but they'll always keep coming back, just like the tumor that you cut out will keep growing back. Jihad is a disease of the mind, and no pill, no surgery can cure the mind, only right thinking can cure the mind. The only cure for bad religion is good religion.

Creative Education

Orson Scott Card talks about how the public education system is designed to kill creativity and children's ability to enjoy learning. He mentions how homework is counterproductive and evil, which alone makes this worth listening to.

Runs 18 minutes

Dean Radin's Extraordinary Synchronicity Story

Dean Radin wanted to create a psi laboratory many years ago. So did Jon Krakower. This is the fascinating story of how they met. Runs 7:40.

Building a Civilization of Love

Catholic priest Rev. Jeffrey Mickler explains what love really is, what it is not, why every society in history has built itself around the natural family, and what horrors result from modern societies breaking with fifty thousand years of common sense. Runs 30 minutes.

Wrecking America on Purpose

Rocking Mr. E explains how Obola is deliberately trying to destroy the United States to initiate a communist society. Runs 10:40

Identity Politics

Rocking Mr. E explains the difference between positive and negative liberties and how identity politics always leads to totalitarianism. Runs 10 minutes.

Minarchism versus Voluntaryism

Rocking Mr. E talks about the difference between the two philosophies, and how they can be compatible. Runs 9 minutes.

Mind over Matter

Another 5th Dimension documentary. This one rates a solid A. There is a nice history of psychical research, including Ted Serios, Nina Kulagina, and Uri Geller. They talk about the work of J. B. Rhine and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research program, then move on to the random event generators of the Global Consciousness Project and the work of Dean Radin. Unlike the last program this was not a debunking exercise. Overall this was a much better, more honest work that presented data and asked the viewer to draw one's own conclusions.

The Sisyphus Gambit

Think about the purpose of reproduction. Nobody cares about it anymore, as evident in declining birthrates and three hundred million aborted Chinese babies (just let than number sink in for a minute, it's more than the deaths from every war fought in the Twentieth Century combined). Reproduction is old hat. In fact, it's so old hat people get offended if you even bring it up. But think of the purpose of biological life for a moment and you'll see it all comes down to reproduction, but what's the point of that? This goes beyond asking why sex exists at all, why did bacteria divide long before sex existed?

It's real simple, but it may come as a surprise. Reproduction is an attempt to cheat death. It's a clever gambit that's been going on for billions of years. At least they tell us it has. There's no real way to tell just how long life's been going on, as I mentioned earlier in "Dreaming of Genesis" and "Dating Anything". It's based on a misperception, that just because something seems old does not mean it really is, but we're talking about appearances here. The truth may be we're in the Matrix and everything is only a hundred years old, or however old the oldest human is. However far back living memory goes there's no way to tell if it ever went back any further, but that's a different topic for a different day.

Let's just say it's billions of years old because that's what convention says. It doesn't really change how you live your life either way. Over time a cell accumulates damage that it cannot repair, mostly from free oxygen, but also from cosmic rays and other environmental hazards. At this point the cell can do one of two things, either it can die or it can divide and give half its damage to each new cell. Now, these new cells can never be as immaculate as the original cell, which started out with zero damage, so over time this whole thing is winding down unless the cells can get smart enough to find a way to repair all the damage. That's the whole point of reproduction: the cells are trying to cheat death long enough to find a way to defeat death for good. Reproduction delays the inevitable.

And somewhere along the line complex forms develop (or don't, but that's another topic), and now they can't well divide in two because there's a brain here and a heart there and to split all the cells in half and restructure everything would be too difficult, so sex has to be invented. Special cells have to be produced that can divide trillions of times and form a whole new body. And you need to bring two members of the same species together for the same reason that bacteria swap genes (plasmids: special bits of DNA that can deliver genes between different bacteria), because otherwise you keep producing copies of the same exact thing and if something comes along and knocks one off then all of the others will be susceptible too. That's why you need diversity.

Now, why there has to be two different specialised units coming together rather than have every individual be a hermaphrodite I can't really say. That part doesn't make sense to me. Maybe it's a trick. Some designer set it up to trick males and females, who aren't all that alike, to come together out of some sadistic joy in seeing if they can get along long enough to reproduce, who knows. These bacteria not only became smart they became psychopathic too, maybe.

Whatever the reason, now you have a system in place where these cells can keep at it, keep multiplying, keep cheating death just a little longer. All in the hope that one day one individual will become smart enough to find a way to repair the damage and then the whole business of reproduction will be over. There will be no reason to make new cells because the old ones are now immortal, or at least until a black hole destroys them. They'll keep making new cells until they figure out how to get rid of the black holes too.

Think about it. You're a door. Through you energy is transmuted to make more people, themselves destined to suffer, reproduce, and die, to keep this race going until either death or the cells get the upper hand. For each individual it doesn't much matter, does it? Unless you're on a farm and you need lots of kids to help plough the fields and milk the cattle, but for city dwellers, for individuals there's no real purpose for any of this, is there? For society yes, for life, yes, but what is the individual supposed to do?



Well, that depends on the individual. Where do you place your faith, in your own abilities or in some promise of a future where descendants you may never see get to live in a paradise on Earth that may never come to pass?

Can Abortion be Justified?

"You can't have rights without responsibilities."



Rocking Mr. E expresses my exact position on abortion. It's actually spooky. I've never heard anyone who I agree with completely on an issue like this. There are usually the fictitious abortion is a right group and the no abortions under any circumstances, no matter how much the baby will suffer for the couple of hours or days it may live group. I'm not the least sorry, but being born without a liver or a brain or a seriously defective heart is not a blessing, it's not beautiful, it's cruel. I couldn't ever subject a child to a brief life of horrific agony. There are certain 100% fatal congenital conditions that no one should be subjected to.



Runs 10 minutes.

Alinskyite Tactics

This right here is the problem with politics today. Political elitists use psychological tricks to get people to feel instead of think, using appeals to emotion to drown out logic. They destroy the character of any who may disagree, and trick people into voting against their own best interests in favour of what feels good. Rocking Mr. E explores these tactics in detail (runs 11 minutes).

The First Swallow

Here is a 1942 cartoon about the swallows of Capistrano. It has nothing to do with mysticism, or politics, or economics, or philosophy, or parapsychology. It's just a lovely little cartoon that reminds us there is still good in the world. Enjoy!

Do It Yourself Dowsing

The following describes a dowsing experiment in Francis Hitching's 1976 book Earth Magic (pages 197-99). Given the opportunity (and the funds) I would love turning this book into a documentary film. Hitching's thorough presentation of the facts is what convinced me that ley lines exist.



That bit at the end is telling about the whole field of parapsychology, and psi in general. It doesn't work like in the movies. You can't just make things happen on command, especially when under pressure. Psi effects manifest when a person is relaxed, which makes studying these phenomena very difficult in a laboratory setting. It also explains why a psychic cannot perform the skep-dick's much touted feat of winning big money in a casino, as the environment of a casino is very distracting (intentionally).



Having never attempted any of these exercises myself I cannot comment on
the in particular. I can say that dowsing is real (Uri Geller made his
millions not on bending spoons but on dowsing for oil) and that I do not
know how it works. Feel free to experiment on your own.



Experiments and Theories



Most dowsers were introduced to the art by watching another dowser at work and then having a try themselves, and simple experiments for newcomers have been devised. Tom Lethbridge, the archaeologist who was able to date Stonehenge correctly, used to suggest holding a short pendulum about three inches long, between thumb and finger, and letting it swing between two coins placed a few inches apart on a table. If the coins are the same metal and value – say, two 10 penny pieces – a natural rhythm will set up in the pendulum, keeping it swinging in a straight line between them. If someone then replaces one of the coins with a different kind of coin – say, a 2 penny piece – the pendulum will swing out of line and probably begin to gyrate. Switch the coins back again, and the pendulum will return to its swing.



Major-General James Scott Elliot, a president of the British Society of Dowsers for some years, thinks it is easier to imagine the pendulum as simply an instrument to find out the answer "yes" or "no" to a question. If you switch on an electric light, hold a pendulum over the cord and ask the question (in your mind): "Is this cord live or not?" the chances are that the pendulum, instead of staying stationary or oscillating, will begin to gyrate clockwise or anticlockwise. If you try the experiment again, this time with the light switched off, and ask the same question, the pendulum will probably gyrate in the opposite direction. The purpose of the exercise is to establish for yourself which way the pendulum gyrates when you want to find the answer "yes" or "no". Afterwards, it is just a question of practice, using common household objects to experiment with. Those suggested often include:



Put four similar coins and one different, under a cloth; seek the different one. (The question you ask must be precise, such as "Is the different coin here?" The pendulum's "yes" or "no" gyration will tell you.)



Take half a dozen or so black playing cards and one red; shuffle and lay face downward on the table: seek the red one.



Get someone to hid a note or object in the shelf of a book case. Work along the book case with a pendulum and locate it.



Take half a dozen cups of water. Ask someone to dissolve a little salt in one. Find the cup with the salt water.



How successful  anybody is at these tests, beginners or not, may depend on a number of unmeasurable factors: how good an innate dowser the person is, his or her state of mind, the influence of outsiders – almost anything including, some dowsers would say, the phase of the moon. For the truth is that although expert dowsers would regard the exercises as very basic, none of them would guarantee to get the answers right all the time, and on unresponsive days no better than chance would predict. The very best water dowsers, of whom there are only a handful in the whole of Great Britain, can claim and prove a success rate of at least 90 percent, but they of all people know that dowsing is a tantalizing, personal and irrational gift and that because of its unpredictability, it is extremely difficult to produce enough of the repeated and repeatable experiments demanded for scientific proof.



When we try for these kinds of tests, they so often go wrong," says one such dowser. "Expecting or hoping for a specific result, anxiety that we'll fail, distraction caused by other people on the site, self-consciousness – any of these things can lead to a misleading result."

Ebola is Airborne

Stefan Molyneux talks about how racialism (pro-black racialism) is helping to spread Ebola just as much as African superstitions that claim Ebola is a curse instead of a viral illness. Runs 25 minutes.

The War on Humans

Are humans the enemy? Should pigs and peas have constitutional rights?
The War on Humans is a 31-minute documentary that critiques growing
efforts to disparage the value of humans in the name of saving the
planet. The documentary investigates the views of anti-human activists
who want to grant legal rights to animals, plants, and "Mother Earth,"
and who want to reduce the human population by up to 90%. The video
features Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith, author of a companion e-book with the same title.

Swami Rama the Himalayan Master

Here is a lovely 20 minute video on the life of Swami Rama, who came to the West and demonstrated yogic powers (siddhis) under controlled scientific conditions.

Ebola in the United States

The "difficult to transmit" Ebola virus that was brought into the US, remember. The nurse who treated the evacuated Liberian man who recently died is confirmed to have contracted the disease. God help us. If Ebola can spread in a US hospital then it can spread anywhere. This isn't just ignorant Africans getting infected because they don't know how to handle the disease, this is people who absolutely know what to do, with more money than fifty African countries combined, and the most advanced equipment on the planet getting infected. And that's not the worst of it. Hospital workers getting infected is bad enough, but this man was released from the hospital after he had developed fever and was later re-admitted before he died. There could be hundreds of people he had contact with during the time he is unaccounted for.



I can't stand that guy. Tom Freakin, the head of the Centers for Disease Dissemination. He is absolutely evil. There is not one single molecule of good in his body. The way he talks down to you in his monotone robotic speech, the blatant lies he tells every time he opens his mouth. This man wants people to die from Ebola. He really does.



The head of SOUTHCOM, General John F. Kelly, spoke to a subordinate who saw Liberians in Central America heading up toward New York City illegally. He states "If there is an outbreak of Ebola in the Caribbean or Central America it would make the 68 thousand unaccompanied children look like a small problem." If Ebola gets to Nicaragua, or Panama, or anywhere else, it will be a repeat of what we see in West Africa. If just one infected person makes it to New York, that person will be in contact with tens of thousands of people each day. If just one percent contract the disease we could see hundreds of cases inside one month. That alone will totally overwhelm the medical infrastructure of the city (remember, they need to be placed in special biohazard wings of these hospitals). And if that happens then martial law will have to be declared.



This is exactly the scenario from my book 7 Days. Every other prediction from the book has so far come true, as I have detailed here. At the time I was surprised to see this last prediction had not happened yet. Now it appears that it has begun.

The Not-So Lovely Bones

So I read this book today, "The Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold. I had wanted to read this for several years and I finally found a copy for sale in the library. You think, a girl gets murdered and tries to communicate to her family about who did it. What could be more exciting than that?



Let me spare you 330 pages.



It sucked.



I could use this book in a writing class on how not to write well, and also as an example of how total crap can still manage to sell millions of copies.



There is a shopping list of characters I had trouble keeping track of, they were so plain and unappealing. I didn't care about a single one of them, except the villain, who I wanted to finally be brought to justice, but he wasn't. The few characters who I do remember I could probably summarise in a couple of words.



You have the mother, who is a selfish disgrace, who has an affair with the keystone cop who has never solved a murder case in his entire career (as evident from the stack of pictures he keeps in his wallet of all the victims he never found), while her husband is in the hospital after being savagely beaten by a thug who he accidentally ran across trying to get laid in a corn field. She then runs off without telling anyone to California for a decade because she just wanted sex, not kids. When she comes back under unbelievable circumstances (her husband has a heart attack and all of a sudden she cares enough to go back home) it's only the teenage son, who she left as a toddler, who has the guts to tell her to fuck off for being a horrible monster of a person, but in the end all is forgive and forget.



The father who, I don't even know what he does, it's mentioned he worked once, but let's assume he's on the welfare because in every scene he is in his study writing down theories of his daughter's death and brooding. He's the butt monkey of the story who gets beaten up, cheated on, and nearly dies.



The sister who is in permanent bitchy mode for several chapters until she becomes the bland, featureless girlfirend of some guy who is equally featureless who drives a motorcycle. He's some kind of a carpenter I think.

He's presented as kind of a bad boy greaser, but he's about as exciting as tepid bath water. They have sex at summer camp, I think.



The brother who tries really hard to be the one normal character in the whole book, but he becomes cold and distant later on after putting up with the collective shit of all the other characters.



The alcoholic grandmother who's been around the block more than a few times acts kind of as a comedy relief character. She also serves as a foil to the mother for a couple of chapters before she runs away to California.



The Indian woman neighbor wants a divorce because she's not living a story book romance.



Her son, the dead girl's boyfriend. He's supposed to be like the most smoking hot guy who ever lived because he's the one brown person in a town of white people. He's that guy all the girls go crazy for and you can never figure out why he's getting laid every night while you and your friends can't get any. Aside from the fact that he's the ONE foreign boy in town I can't figure out why he's so damn attractive. He has sex with the dead girl when she possesses the body of the feminazi in the second to last chapter. I shit you not. They're a half mile from the murder scene, the dead girl possesses the body of this girl who's driving with the Indian guy, and she has a couple hours with him to tell him "hey, my body is buried right there, behind those trees. You can solve the murder that's been open for a decade right now, just go there and dig. There's fifteen pages left in the book, you can bring colsure to the entire story, just dig up the fucking body." Nope. She says "come with me in the shower and let's fuck" and even though she's possessing the body of the feminazi the Indian guy doesn't find it at all odd and they fuck right there.



There's the keystone cop, who's specialty is not solving crimes, it's seducing other men's wives. He's apparently done it a lot of time, since the book says he has a special room where he goes to have affairs with more women than you will ever date in your entire life.



There's the feminazi who turned total batshit crazy after the girl died. She started smoking pot and drawing the women from Playboy. She writes poetry and sees crimes against women everywhere she goes. Literally. She hallucinates rapes and murders everywhere.


She'll go get coffee and see an apparition behind the counter of a dead woman. Or she'll see a murder taking place on a rooftop across the street. She obsesses over solving the dead girl's murder, but when she finally gets the idea to go to where the body is hidden, and she sees the dead girl's ghost, she doesn't say anything to the Indian boy, she writes it down and then pretends like nothing happened. She passes out for no evident reason and spends a few hours in the most boring Heaven imaginable reading poems to dead beatniks while the dead girl is having sex with her body.



There's the villain who is like the god of all pedophiles.

He's killed at least 20 people but he's so non-threatening, he's so pathetic, that nobody ever suspects him. Except the father, and the sister, but they're dismissed as crazy because the god of pedophiles can't be guilty because all the police in this world are totally incompetent. He has a diagram of the murder scene and the thinnest of tissue paper alibis, and the keystone cops believe him! After ten years everyone forgets about him and the dead girl. The dead girl, hovering over him while he's outside having a smoke, startles him with a falling icicle, he has a heart attack, and dies. On the second to last fucking page. That's how it ends. She literally could have killed him at any time in the entire story, but she waits until the second to last page because I guess the author saw the book was going to end and needed an actual ending or a lot of people would be pissed off. She would have been happy just to let him get away scott free.



Then there's the dead girl herself, who narrates this book. And she talks non-the-fuck-stop about the most boring, tangential crap nobody cares about. This book could have easily been 120 pages, but it just kept going about train rides and tomato plants, and boring every day shit like those old books the so called "great" authors wrote back in the day when they were paid by the word so they wrote these absolutely huge monstrosities that could bore you to sleep. At LEAST half the book is useless tangents that don't advance the story at all.



And you have the absolute most boring depiction of Heaven ever in all of literature. Every day the dead girl sits in a gazebo and watches the people on Earth, and every night all the dead people gather together and have a rock concert or something. It wouldn't even be a week before I got bored of that, let alone eternity.



I'm glad I only paid a dollar for it. This is definitely one to skip.

40/100

Donate not Dump

Rob Greenfield, a political activist of some kind, travels across America eating out of trash cans to demonstrate how enough food is thrown away every year to feed all our hungry. This is something I've been saying for years. It's a disgrace that so much food is wasted.

Rainbow Rocks Review

My review of Equestria Girls: Rainbow Rocks. Also up at my My Little Pony page.

I saw Rainbow Rocks at the first showing and I must say it was worth every pfennig (though I only have ten and they're not accepted as legal tender anywhere on Earth). I've written six pages of let's call it running commentary on the movie from memory, twelve hours after I saw it (so there might be a couple of mistakes). It's much more detailed than my normal reviews that I've just noticed I haven't been posting here very often. Well, here it is. Since the whole thing is outlined on MLP wiki and it's already up on Youtube I'm not too worried about spoilers. Just in case I'll put some arrow things, if y'all don't want to read it.

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Those short videos that have been released, the ones where Rarity and Fluttershy deal with the hamsters and Vinyl dances in the street, they appear nowhere in the movie. That was a surprise. The movie was short enough, only 75 minutes. They could have added the shorts to make it longer.



We begin as we have seen in the spoilers that have been officially released (I've done probably 80% of my best to avoid the unofficial spoilers) in the human world where Adagio Dazzle, Sonata Dusk (she's the adorable one), and Aria Blaze are in the shop feeding off of human misery when they spot the magic rainbow from the end of the first movie and Adagio conceives a plan to take over the world using the magic brought into this world with Twilight's crown (left over, after the crown was taken back).







Cue the first song during the opening credits: "Rainbow Rocks". It's cool.



Sunset Shimmer is uncomfortable in the auditorium, being ostracized by the other students, and finds a little relief with the mane five, who are always, unintentionally, bringing up what she did in the past, leading to frequent repetition of "no offense," "none taken." Tia and Lulu arrive and mention the Fall Formal, making things worse.



One very nice thing about this movie is the directionality of the sound. They shift the channels depending on where the character is, so you can tell if someone is to the right or left, and when they move the sound moves with them.



We then see the mane five practice, under the name The Rainbooms. Cue second song: "Better than Ever". A tear nearly snuck out of my eye when they sang "we're the Wondercolts forever." The girls get pony features when they sing, and not just from friendship, but also from excellence, as we see RD start to develop features alone when she's acting like a total jerk. Flutters wants to sing the song she wrote, but RD is being an even bigger narcissistic, egotistical jerk than usual (and that's saying something) and is actually mean to Flutters. Rarity wants to pick out costumes for the band and AJ is also mean and dismissive, in an odd way. She had little problem with Rarity picking out the dresses for the Fall Formal, and she has to know that bands don't just wear anything, but the writers need to add the seed of conflict. Pinkie Pie doesn't like the arguing, but not because it's not productive or is totally unnecessary or is not what friendship is about, but because she's bored of it. Herein lies three of the main problems that will turn up again and again throughout the movie. They are a significant plot point, so pay attention.



Flash, aka Brad, aka waifu thief, bursts in looking for waifus to steal (he wants to know if Twi will be there). AJ says no and Flash leaves in dejection.







Sunny is called by the principal to introduce the new students, who are the villains, to the school. More Sonatabetes.



Jump to the cafeteria, and the next song: "Battle of the Bands". We see that the mane five, plus Sunny, are the only ones immune to the villains' powers. It is a very sensual song, with a lot of curvy ladies moving about enticingly, from interesting angles, caressing people, and uncrossing their legs. The camera does seem to linger on certain things more than I expected. Hot damn, they're taking risks with this movie.



And all of this was spoiled. Officially. Almost the first fifteen minutes were revealed by Hasbro on the Internet. Nearly one fifth the whole movie was given away for free. This is simultaneously my biggest gripe and the very thing that led me to spend actual money on the movie. Had I not seen those clips, going off just the shorts that serve as a sort of prequel, I would have thought this would be terrible and never have gone. The official spoilers made me realise how awesome this was going to be.



Tia and Lulu are under the villain's hypno magic spell, so they turn to the last bit of magic they know: Sunny's book. She uses it to write letters to Celestia, like Twi, only without the need for a dragon. Of course we never learned of this before, but that's okay. They don't know if it will work, but it does, or the movie would end right there.



Cut to the only pony part of the whole movie. Ponyville is as it was after Tirek destroyed it, so weeks, maybe months have passed since the previous movie. The other copy of the book is now in Twi's possession. She reads that her human friends (and Sunny) are in trouble and has to think of a way to help. She reads up on the villains, who turn out to be sirens. Starswirl banished them to Earth (thanks a lot) a really long time ago, which means that even though they look like high school students they're really hundreds of years old, which means they're not jailbait, they're sexy grannies. It also means they are immortal.



Twi hooks the book up to the mirror, says some science-y bullshit, and then bypasses the thirty moons restriction. She tells her friends to stay behind, because it's not like we've had a ton of episodes where telling your friends to stay behind turned out to be a really bad idea. She goes through the portal with Spike and that's the last we ever see of ponies.



She enters human world and is met with a group hug that leaves poor Sunny high and dry. It's so sad how people treat her until the very end. That's a plot point, pay attention.



They figure they have to stop the villains quickly, so they barge into the auditorium and try to do their friendship beam but it doesn't work, because without the crown music is the only thing that can activate magic, for some reason. Now they have to enter the battle of the bands and use a musical "counter spell" to activate the friendship beam. The entire onus of the task is foisted upon Twi, who tries to tell everyone she can't do it alone, but they don't listen because they are preoccupied with previous plot points. These are all plot points, pay attention.



Lyra and Bon Bon are there, together.



Twi goes to sleep in the library, but Pinkie Pie insists she and everyone else, and Sunny, stay at her house. We get to see them all looking cute in their pyjamas (AJ's got feet!). AJ and RD are playing a Mane-iac video game, and just before AJ wins RD turns off the power, then taunts AJ. Dear Lord, RD has become a total jerkass by this point. Why would anyone EVER want to spend time with her?



When everyone is asleep Twi sneaks into the kitchen to write her song, when Sunny comes in and asks if she can help. She opens the refrigerizor to discover it is entirely full of whipped cream, which she eats off her fingers (it's getting hot in here?). They are interrupted by Maud (who is stunning in human form), who seems to have gone full retard, pouring crackers on a "hungry" Boulder, making a mess throughout the house as she walks away. Twi and Sunny almost get to the point where Twi asks for help, but she backs down at the last second.








The next day the song isn't working. They practice in AJ's barn. One of them says "at least we're better than the last time" and Big Mac walks past the window for the sole purpose of saying "nope." People cracked up over that one. Daft Punk reference. Well, without the spell they have to win the battle of the bands the old fashioned way, by being good singers. Those designated arguments start up again. Remember them? You were paying attention, weren't you?



At school Snips and Snails try to rap, badly, and lose right away though they think they're so cool. The mane six sing next, cue next song: "Shake Your Tail" (a different version than the one that was released months ago). Rarity is wearing a coat with metal dangly bits. For some reason Photo Finish uses magnets to sabotage her. AJ doesn't seem to care that it wasn't Rarity's fault. Snips and Snails chase Flutters with a spotlight, Pinkie's party cannon almost chokes Twi to death and something else happens that I don't remember. They argue some more, but they're good enough to move on.



Derpy has a band of what I can only assume are background ponies, and they all play strange quasi instruments: a cow bell and a triangle, and Derpy plays a saw. It's cool.



Cue montage. We're gonna' need a montage! Ooo it takes a montage! Show lots of things happening at once; remind everyone what's going on! To show it all would take too long. Even Rocky had a montage. While The Dazzlings sing "Under Our Spell" we see the progression of the contest. We see the CMC in their Show Stoppers outfits and flashing lights, Snowflake beats Lyra and Bon Bon (who are playing piano together, rubbing cheeks, almost adopting fannon completely) with a violin that is four sizes too small, the mane six beat Octy (who speaks one line, for the first time ever), and Brad's band beats someone, before themselves getting beaten (Brad, under the siren spell, hates Twi, and he made her cry).







The mane six play the Jerk's song about how she's the best person in the universe and everyone else sucks (seriously, what is magic again? I think I know why the friendship beam didn't work the first time). It rots, but RD is so in love with herself that she almost transforms. Sunny can't let the villains see her transform, so she tackles her and everyone gets pissed off. More pissed off.



Trixie plays a song "Tricks up My Sleeve". It is... interesting. And kind of long, and kind of like a filler song. Trixie plays the role of minor villain. This is a plot point, pay attention. Trixie is better, but the villains hypnotise Tia, who lets the mane six win. Trixie gets pissed and the next day, when the mane six are about to perform, she opens a trap door and traps them beneath the stage. Since the mane six can't be found Trixie takes their spot and performs again.



Beneath the stage everyone is fighting even more. This allows the villains to suck up their magic and they use it to transform themselves into anthros (pony ears, tails, and bat wings) with glowing red eyes. It's a very cool transformation. Sunny jumps in and saves the day. She points out the obvious, that all those plot points I told you to remember are the reason they can't make the magic work. Everyone atones. AJ accepts Rarity's outfits, and RD accepts Flutters' song. That door RD had been banging on for hours opens up. Turns out it opens in, not out. Spike brought Vinyl to help. Her headphones cancel out the siren spell. She also has a car that transforms into an amp.



The villains are singing their song and are just about ready to take over when the heroes sing back. The villains release their siren forms (which look like sea ponies) to physically do battle with the mane six, who have transformed into their anthro forms as well, and they almost win, but Twi finally asks Sunny for help and she picks up the mic and starts to sing. She takes her coat off, so you know this shit's just got real, revealing a nice backless top she never wore before. She transforms too, into good mode this time. Together their singing creates a giant alicorn of light which destroys the villains' pendants and busts them down to normal. They try to sing, to regain control of the crowd, but now their singing sucks and they run away in shame.







Brad hugs Twi, and Sunny reveals she's a totally awesome guitar player and she's now a permanent part of the band. Twi leaves. Sometime in the future Sunny is writing to Twi through the magic book, which allows the portal to be opened at any time. It's really sweet.



There is no pony bit at the end like last time. We go straight to the credits, and they are lovely. Last time there were just scrolling words, with Derpy at the very end, but this time there are a series of very lovely drawings of many of the characters. The song "Shine Like Rainbows" plays.







At the very end, after the credits, we see someone looking over a wall of pictures and charts centered around Canterlot High. It is human Twilight with her real dog Spike (first alluded to by Pinkie Pie in the previous movie). She is certain that something profoundly unusual is going on there.








They took a lot more risks with this movie than the last one, which was mostly bronybait. Sunny actually says she transformed into a demon and in the final song battle the word soul is used. In this fundamaterialistic naytheist progressive age anything that even remotely resembles religion is strictly forbidden, no matter how non-specific, so that was something to see. Adagio calls her comrades idiots, and in this progressive age where words don't mean things anymore anything that sounds like shaming people who are not "neurotypical" (a bullshit, made up word for normal people) is strictly forbidden. Lyrabon shipping. This one actually has nothing to do with progressivism, it has to do with how fandoms work. Shippers will go down with their ships, and anytime one particular ship is even hinted at officially it is going to piss a lot of people off. Lastly, there is a whole lot of sexy movement and camera angles. That is what surprised me most. It was nothing compared to actual high school (which would have to have a lot of stuff cut just to get an R rating), but for My Little Pony, I never expected that.



But none of that bothered me. They were the good kind of surprises (not the bad kind, like IRS surprises). There were three things I didn't like: 1. the movie was really short, 2. Maud, who is writing her PhD dissertation on geology, can't be so retarded that she would dump crackers on Boulder expecting him to really eat them, and 3. RD has turned into a total jerkass for no evident reason. I can't imagine how RD could have gone from where she was at the end of the first movie, at most a couple months earlier, to being a complete jerk, who is so unbelievably mean to all her friends that she makes the rumors Sunny spread in the first movie look small in comparison. Seriousry? She's Gilda bad. Her jerkness was the only thing that turned me off, and the only thing that deducted points from an otherwise perfect movie.



My final rating is 94/100. I can't possibly recommend seeing this in person enough (or at least buying the Blu-ray when it comes out 28 October).

Dr Peter Fenwick on Near Death Experience

Dr Peter Fenwick, renowned neuro-psychiatrist, will discuss his research
on the near-death experience.Dr Peter Fenwick is an internationally
renowned neuropsychiatrist and a Fellow of the Royal College of
Psychiatrists. He is Britain's leading clinical authority on near-death
experiences and is president of the British branch of The International
Association for Near-Death Studies.

Runs 17 Minutes

Becoming a Man

Norah Vincent, a lesbian writer, goes undercover as Ned, a working class man, to discover the inner workings of male behaviour. Her 18 month experiment, written about in the 2006 book Self-Made Man, ended with mental distress and depression. She discovered that male privilege is a myth, that women have all the power and are cold, distant, and cruel, and that being a man is a whole lot more difficult than anyone in modern politically correct society is allowed to think.


Here is a 19 minute television feature.

The Daily Revolver

For the 100th episode of The Daily Evolver with Jeff Salzman and Ken Wilber here's more of the same crap!

Wow! Thomas Jefferson was a serial rapist hypocrite for writing the Declaration of Independence and owning slaves. Carefully ignore the fact that the South was needed to win independence from Britain and the Constitution was designed to be a ticking time bomb to kill slavery after Britain was defeated. Ignore Jefferson's work at abolishing slavery while in office, and even began to free his own slaves until he was burdened with immanent bankruptcy, keeping him from freeing the remainder before his death. He wanted to end slavery gradually because he thought flooding the country with a million people who have nowhere to go, no education, and no skills outside serving whites was a disaster waiting to happen. Jefferson had a mutual affair with one slave. Rapists don't spend nearly as much money on their victims, and don't show preferential treatment to their mutual children either. Nope. It's just easier to paint him as a racialist old white guy patriarch.

"Slavery was outlawed in industrial societies because industrial societies have morals that say slavery is wrong."
Yeah. The abolitionists weren't outspoken Christian groups - mostly Methodists, it was cold, atheistic industrialists. You could have fooled me. It also had nothing to do with economics, like how child labour laws were invented because the men of the labour unions were tired of losing their jobs to disposable children who could be paid next to nothing. Nope. Morality took a quantum leap when steam engines were created and people became citizens of the world. Why does public education exist? Because kids need their learnding? No, because they can't vote, and the voters decided they were tired of children taking their jobs so they made school mandatory! Genius, no? They removed their main competition and made it look like compassion when it was really greedy self-interest!

Children are born as "little Nazis." And that's the reason terrorists and Republicans still exist and we're not living in Star Trek. Extremely poor attempt at humour from two old childless men.

Speaking of terrorism again, mention Hamas and ISIS in passing, but spend a whole minute talking about "Christians bombing abortion clinics" (seriously, when the fuck was the last time that happened?), "Buddhists releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway" (Aum Shinrikyo are not Buddhists, they're crazy people who worship a man who says he is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ as foretold by Nostradamus and the Free Masons), and "Buddhists killing Hindus in Sri Lanka" (conducted by racial supremacists).

"You can only do so much damage with bows and arrows, but once modernity invented gas chambers then people with tribal mentality could kill 20,000 people a day."
Tell that to the people of Rwanda. One million dead in 100 days is 10,000 a day, and they were mostly killed with farm tools. The Aztecs easily killed more than 20,000 a day with stone knives when they consecrated their temples. The Islamic conquest of India is replete with massacres in the tens of thousands killed daily under monsters like Mahmoud of Ghazni and Timur.

Don't say global warming, don't say global warming, don't say global warming.
SHIT! He said global warming.

Here's a real funny statement. I almost fell out of my chair:
The vanishingly small population of truly integral people are clustered "at the highest levels of achievement: government, NGOs, business, etc. The people pulling the levels of power have to be, almost. You could almost make the argument that you can't be a successful global leader of an organisation and not be at least functionally teal (holistic, seeks maximum freedom for maximum number of people, rewards competence over anything else (meritocratic), able to hold big picture views, can see the value in different points of view, open to the possibility of being wrong)."

That's got to be the biggest crock of bullshit since global warming! Is Warren Buffet integral? The man who sabotaged the Keystone pipeline because he's making a fortune shipping oil into the US on his rail cars? The man who lobbies for higher income tax yet religiously seeks every single loophole in existence while simultaneously creating new ones? Is Obola integral? Forget I asked, you had two or three videos creaming your pants over him as the messiah, the product of the all-knowing quantum field, the most highly developed human of this or any generation, past, present, or future, the best president who has ever lived or will ever live.

I wouldn't trust the average politician with my mechanical pencil, I certainly wouldn't trust the average politician around any children, and I'd be damned if I said I trusted the average politician running a lemonade stand, let alone a government. Either I'm a fucking moron or the absolute worst human garbage ascends to the top of the political (and corporate) ladder. The most dishonest, self-serving, pieces of shit are in the positions of power, not the most enlightened.

They then go off saying that pre-modern people are the cause of all the trouble in the world, and if we just stop treating them like modern people and trying to dump democracy onto them then we could think of real solutions, then they say "well, China is mostly pre-modern, but they're civilised, and Africa is mostly pre-modern, but most of them are civilised, it's just that damn Middle East that seems to be puzzling for some reason we can't put our finger on...."
I'll give you three guesses. Take your time. I'm just going to be over here eating a banana, playing with a boomerang, and looking through my telescope at the nearest celestial body.

Ooo, they said Islamic! They said "well, China is run by rational communists and India is full of people who practice yoga and are nonviolent, but the Islamic fundamentalists could use their oil money to bypass modernity."

Then they keep droning on and it's not helping that my head has hurt for the past 30 hours.






Anyway, here's a video of a chick with three tits. You've suffered enough.

The Not So Secret Swami

There's a "documentary" film produced in 2004 called "The Secret Swami" on Sathya Sai Baba. It is nothing but a hit piece. The woman, Tanya Datta, "investigating" claims of sexual abuse is not conducting an investigation at all, she is a die hard true believer that Sai Baba is guilty and doesn't even listen to any counter arguments. The one man who she speaks with for most of the film, Alaya Rahm, a former devotee who claims to have been molested, is a heroin addict who retracted his lawsuit against Sai Baba. He has sued several people for completely spurious claims to get money to buy more drugs. And this man is the BEST she can do. One case against Sai Baba was thrown out of court when the supposed "victims" took the stand and said they had never met the prosecutor before in their lives and that they never made any claims against Sai Baba.



Here is a wonderful piece written by
Ranbir Singh that excoriates the BBC for making such a blatantly untruthful film.

On The Herero Genocide

From 1905 to 1907 the German empire fought a guerrilla war against the Herero, Nama, and other tribes of Namibia. Tens of thousands of people got pushed into the desert where many of them died. While officially recognised as a genocide by the German government in 2004, could this not have been the result of poor military planning and a miscalculation of what the native peoples would do when pushed to extremes? The deaths of so many people could have been an unfortunate effect of war and not a deliberate attempt at extermination. Here is a thought provoking video that runs 41 minutes.

Area 51 Insider Testimony

Ufologist Richard Dolan talks to a retired operative with the CIA, "Anonymous", who reveals what he saw at Area 51 during the Eisenhower administration. Is this deathbed confession genuine or is it fake? I can't say, but it is interesting. Runs 17 minutes.

Richard Dolan on Disclosure

UFOlogist Richard Dolan explaining how ET disclosure would reveal the true structure of global government. Who really runs the world? Who would have authority to tell the public? Would the want to? Runs 10 minutes.

The Lost Island

Many islands appear on old maps that correspond to nothing at all. This leads modern "scholars" to dismiss everything that appears on antique maps. However some of these islands fit too neatly with existing landmasses to dismiss as myth. One of them is Antillia.



Antillia is a large, mostly rectangular island with a peninsula at the one end, with its long axis oriented North-South. It has seven prominent bays along its coast. Here is an old map of Antillia compared to a modern CIA map of Puerto Rico. It can be seen that the two islands are very similar in shape.








The Portugese were early explorers who rediscovered many islands, including the Azores in the early 15th century. Their navagation methods were not very sophisticated at the time, and they miscalculated the size of the Earth (it IS a myth that people in the Early Modern Period thought the Earth was flat. It had been known since Hellenistic times that the Earth was a sphere.). The distance from the Azores to Antillia was estimated at 1,400 kilometers, whereas the actual distance between the Azores and Puerto Rico is 4,500 kilometers, putting them off by a factor of three.



If you sail in a straight line from Portugal to Puerto Rico you would approach the island from the North East. The island, as viewed directly from Portugal, would appear to be oriented with the long axis vertical (North-South), as it appears on early maps identified as Antillia. Portugese explorers are said to have discovered (or rediscovered even, as many stories attribute the original discovery to Arab sailers 700 years prior) Antillia in the 1420s, more than 70 years before Columbus in 1493.



Columbus planned his voyages based on maps from earlier Portugese sailers. It is no coincidence he landed where he did, in the West Indies. He was headed in the direction of Antillia on those maps. Antillia was what Columbus was looking for, not India, not China, not Indonesia. It is no coincidence that Columbus arrived at Puerto Rico during his second voyage, it was intentional.



In some maps a chain of islands appear in an arc along the long axis of Antillia, to the "South". When we reorient the map these islands correspond very closely to the chain of islands known today as the Lesser Antilles. These too are real islands.








If we look at a polar projection of the Earth we can see the Caribbean as it would appear from Portugal if the Earth was flat like a map. The islands are now situated vertically. Similarly Antillia is depicted on maps as being a large, rectangular island oriented with its long axis running slightly off from vertical at roughly the same latitude as Portugal. On the polar projection we can see Puerto Rico is a largely rectangular island, with its long axis situated nearly vertically, at roughly the same latitude as Portugal.



Early maps depicting Antillia were navigational charts. They did not attempt to accurately depict the shape of the Earth as a sphere, but provided an estimate of distances and directions for ships' pilots. Early maps were far from accurate. Florida and California were both depicted as islands at first, and Ceylon was placed to the West of India, instead of the East where it really is. Accuracy of distances decreased the farther from the mainland a ship traveled. This can be seen with the position of the Azores islands, with the error in distance increasing with the farther islands. The distance to the Azores are often underestimated. The same is true with Antillia, which is placed three times closer to Europe than the Caribbean is in reality.



On some maps directly above Antillia (to the West on our reoriented polar projection) is another large island called Satanazes. Sometimes there are four islands depicted. There are four larger islands in the Caribbean (Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico), along with numerous smaller ones.



The identification with Antillia and the islands surrounding it with the islands of the Caribbean is nothing new. It has been a stubborn hypothesis from the very beginning of the age of exploration. On his 1492 globe German mariner and geographer Martin Behaim placed Antilia along the Tropic of Cancer, just slightly to the north of Cuba. Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, a Spanish historian writing in 1511, explicitly states that Columbus reached Antillia on his voyages.



Early 19th century German geographer Johann Georg Heinrich Hassel posited the same hypothesis in 1822 and late 19th early 20th century American lawyer, writer, and historian William H. Babcock was published in the peer reviewed Geographical Review detailing the Antillia in the Caribbean hypothesis. He also wrote a book about the subject, that was published the year he died.



Cuba appears to be the most popular candidate for historians and geographers. Personally, with its location and very blocky shape, I identify Antillia with Puerto Rico. It just fits. It fits a lot better than old maps of Scandinavia or China or maps that left out the Arabian peninsula entirely. The shape, position, and location of the islands of Antillia on old maps fits well with the four large islands of the Caribbean. And it is by no means impossible to suggest that the Portuguese discovered these islands 70 years prior to Columbus. The New World had already been visited by the Vikings in the year AD 1000. Hanno the Navigator explored the coast of Africa up to Cameroon in 500 BC. Pre-Columbian Atlantic travel was not only possible, it is historical fact.



Another "lost" island, seen in the picture, is Brasil, also known as Hy-Brasil. You can read more about it in the picture, and here.

The Sage of Arunachula

Lovely 72 minute film on the life of Ramana Maharshi.

Abide as the Self

A lovely hour long film on Ramana Maharshi, narrated by Ram Dass. Presented here are rare photos and bits of film to go along with the story of Ramana's life and his essential teachings on self enquiry.

Michael Savage at Ellis Island

Dr. Michael Savage gave a six minute impromptu speech on his son's boat off Ellis Island about how the son of an immigrant made it big in America, and how the tyranny his family escaped in Europe has transplanted itself here a century later.

Women Against Feminism

Supposedly fewer women are identifying as feminists. I don't know, I didn't check the actual study, if there was one. BUT, if that's true it is fantastic. This disease must be eradicated.

Western Women - The Most Privileged Demographic Ever

One of the best videos ever. Absolutely true.

The Conspiracy to Kill Jesus Video

Was there a conspiracy to pin the blame of the death of Jesus on the Jewish people? Runs about 10 minutes.

Searching for a Miracle

A few months ago I showed you a video about doing hard time in a Zen monastery. Now here is a look at a Tibetan monastery in Russia where Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov had entered suspended animation nearly a century ago.

You're born, go to school, get a job, make money, get old, and die. Is that all there is to life? Two students disagree and decide to learn the ways of the Buddha to find more in life. Runs 24 minutes.

"We Don't Need More Copyright" - Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property

"We don't need more copyright," says Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell. "Probably we could dial it back and still enjoy this great wealth of culture that's been generated, that's already in our libraries."

Bell, a self-described "intellectual property skeptic," sat down with Reason TV to discuss his new book "Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good."

Contemporary copyright law is a statutory privilege that inevitably contradicts our constitutional rights to free expression. The prospect of litigation scares off artists who want to create new works that exist in legal grey areas, like mashups, tributes, or parodies.

Bell's solution rests on a much simpler idea: we should emphasize common law instead of copyright. Common law -- which is to say, the established precedents that govern ordinary property, contracts, and torts -- already form the foundation of the American legal system. It provides plenty of encouragement for artists and designers to create new works, without the statutory failures of the current system.

How might the arts fare in a world without copyright protection? To a large extent, we already know the answer. Perfumes, jokes, recipes, fashion, furniture, and automobile design have never enjoyed copyright protection. Yet there's no shortage of creativity in any of these fields. Artists still find ways to make money -- sometimes a great deal of it -- in the absence of special legal protection.

After meeting with policymakers on Capitol Hill, Bell is hopeful about the prospects for reforming the Copyright Act. Legislators are starting to accept what consumers have long understood about the digital age: modern copyright law hinders the very innovation it was designed to promote.

Runs about 8:30.

Ask a Monk: Friendship

Caring, attachment, and relationships in the Theravada tradition. Runs 14 minutes.

The Lost World of Tibet

Old colour films, from the 1930s to the 1950s, combined with interviews of survivors, detail the history of Tibet and the Chinese conquest. Runs 49 minutes.

Your Ego on Drugs

Michael Prescott started a discussion on psychedelic drugs and how they may just produce hallucinations instead of genuine experiences of non-physical reality like NDEs. He provided a number of examples of bad trips and experiences with insectoids and reptilians and contrasted this with the fact that there have only ever been a handful of reported hellish NDEs. He admits to being biased against psychedelic drugs and not being particularly interested in investigating further (though he shows some more interest toward the end).



The problem I have when reading about these bad trips is that the people usually seem like jerks and bums. They like doing drugs recreationally, looking for a trip rather than insight, they are generally dismissive toward the cultures that use them for spiritual purposes, they hang around with jerk friends, seem like moral relativists, and just exude an air of jerkness. It may very well be that when you pierce the veil of illusion and you're living a crappy life the entities on the other side admonish you to get your act together.



Regarding insectoids/reptilians, earth insects are just as real as earth humans, so why should spirit insects not be as real as spirit humans? I would expect the vast majority of non-physical worlds to be inhabited by non-humanoids. Especially in the lower worlds, where the more malicious or jerk spirits live.



Maybe this is a way of punishing people who reach too far for things they are not ready to possess. The universe is set up in such a way where one cannot gain without giving something up. One cannot gain the Truth without giving up the illusion of the separate self, and when people want both that's like trying to put two north pole magnets together – it just doesn't work. There's a reason people train for decades in preparation for genuine mystical insight, and why only a few thousand people at any one time really put the effort into it at all. It would take the average person possibly billions of years in lower spiritual worlds (which may be very nice heavenly worlds by earth standards, but they're still illusions, just nice illusions) before being able to ascend to the higher formless worlds. When people try to get the Truth all at once without doing the work of preparing their minds to accept it maybe a mechanism is in place to bring forth these more horrific entities. They still get shown the Truth, or as much as they can take in, but they also get kicked in the teeth for trying to fly too close to the sun.



The Truth is itself very traumatic to anyone who is not prepared to receive it. In many of the stories of bad trips the people are all heavily invested in the ego, they all want to pursue a life of sensory gratification, of worldliness, and at the same time they go and reach for the Truth, but the Truth is not material, it is not worldly. People are traumatized to suddenly experience that this life isn't real, that the separate self is a fiction the mind creates, that all this egoic worldly stuff is a lie. It's completely natural to feel broken down, like your life is worthless, when you see you've been going in the wrong direction all along, running in circles, chasing after illusions. It takes a lot of training to basically get over yourself enough to make the mind ready to accept the Truth, and to have the ego boundary shattered all at once, while being heavily invested in the lie, is going to be painful.



Now here's Ken Wilber discussing psychedelic drugs for 18 minutes.

Alchemy - European Mysticism

The three types of humans: animal, rational, and spiritual (typified by the alchemist); the origin of sin and its elimination; the fundamental drives of human behaviour. Runs 9:40

Dante's Peak

I watched Dante's Peak today for the first time in years. Did you know you have to wait about 40 minutes before anything happens? They want to set up the bullshit love story between the single mom and Pierce Brosnan, who is one of the least convincing scientists I've ever seen. It's a movie about a volcano, I came to see the volcano, I don't care about what all these humans are doing.

Anyway, there is a subplot with a NASA robot that looks like it's wasting a lot of time (and it is), but the radio transmitter turns out to be something useful during the last five minutes. It's kind of an ass pull solution to having Pierce and his new family survive.

Oh look, another subplot with the stubborn mother-in-law, who dies anyway, to inject even more unneeded melodrama into the story! Pierce and his new family go out of their way to rescue her, twenty minutes go by, they get trapped by the volcano, and wouldn't you know it the old woman jumps into the acid lake for no reason, gets seriously burned, and dies two minutes later. But they needed a way to get Pierce and his new family trapped so they could use the stupid NASA thing that they wasted another twenty minutes explaining, so they had to do this, right?

Pierce's boss justifiably refuses to go against all reason, evidence, and the opinions of nine other scientists, and order an evacuation of the town because of Pierce's gut reaction. It doesn't matter that Pierce has NOTHING supporting him (except the old frog in the pot aphorism, which he pulls out of nowhere and looks ridiculous compared to the nine other geologists real life stories of hundreds of real life volcanoes that did the same thing and didn't erupt). It doesn't matter that there has been no activity for a week and that Pierce comes off as a lunatic who is trying to score with the mayor (and probably does when they're trapped in the convenient cave). Nope. Pierce's boss is evil (and FAT! They have to make the designated villain the fattest person in the whole movie, because we all know fat people are evil and sexy beefcake Pierce Brosnan is good because he's sexy.). Pierce's boss MUST die in a mudslide, get flipped over, and girly scream before being crushed to death. He's probably the only person in the whole movie we actually see get killed and they had to give him a comical death because if you EVER disagree with Pierce Brosnan about ANYTHING you MUST DIE! It's not even enough that he apologised on the phone to Pierce before getting killed. Nope. You must die. And girly scream. I'm surprised they didn't show him peeing his pants, given everything else they did to humiliate him.

But the dog has to live, right? THE DOG HAS TO LIVE! And hey, it looks like it was never in any danger ever. Good job. You saved the dog that was in maybe thirty seconds of the movie. The humans who did absolutely nothing wrong? Nope. Kill them with extreme prejudice. But the totally unimportant dog has to live.

The volcano has liquid lava and then explodes, which I'm not saying could never happen, but I don't think it ever has. Sure, it can happen. The atoms in my body can quantum tunnel into orbit around Jupiter and I can freeze to death, but it probably will never happen. Having highly fluid lava pretty much rules out the possibility of an explosive eruption, which requires very thick lava that traps all the gas inside until it blows.

Pierce finds an abandoned truck with no keys and hotwires it in two seconds. Because all geologists can hotwire all vehicles if they are sexy enough.

Pierce then drives his magic truck through a lava flow safely. I'll give you a few minutes to let that sink in. Pierce drives his magic truck through a lava flow safely. The tires should have burst the second they touched the lava, and everyone inside should have been killed by the heat at the very least. We see the wheel wells raging with flames, for five minutes while he's driving through lava, LAVA, and nothing happens. He just drives through lava and nothing happens.

They outrun the 800 mph pyroclastic flow which instantly obliterates the whole town, but we all know an abandoned truck caked with volcanic ash that Pierce Brosnan hotwired then drove through lava can travel at 801 mph. He drives it into a cave, which should have been a death trap, but he's Pierce Brosnan, so he lives. And now he has a new family because there's nothing traumatising about surviving a volcanic eruption. Nope. Pierce gets to bang the single mom and gets to play daddy to her two kids who are the reason the whole second half of the movie even happened, because they are too dumb to live. And how did the 8 year old boy even reach the peddles on the truck, let alone drive it ten plus miles up the volcano to rescue the stubborn mother-in-law? Doesn't matter, because happy ending.

This movie really blows.

The World Gone Mad 2014 Update

Let's see, Iraq has been conquered by ISIS, the Egyptian goddess of sewing dead bodies back together. It's apt, since they're trying to sew the caliphate back together. Baghdad and Damascus were the capitals of the caliphate a thousand years ago and for good measure they want to capture both. Tens of thousands are dead already and they've taken control of almost the entire country in a couple weeks.

My Reaction: I don't care. Let them have Iraq. Enough American blood has been spilled there for nothing.



Iran and Saudi Arabia are waging proxy war in Syria, which ISIS is also trying to conquer. They're trying to lour the US to war there because the Saudis want to eliminate their greatest threat in the region but they don't want their own sons to die and they know the Americans are stupid and suicidal. Israel has started bombing Syria.

My Reaction: Let them. Bomb the whole country for all I care. It makes no sense for the US to get involved, kick out Assad like they did Saddam, and hand the country over to the monsters who want to erase everything that's happened in the past 500 years.



There appears to be a cease fire between Ukraine, which was conquered by the CIA in a covert coup last year, and Russia, who the CIA backed Ukrainian puppet government attacked unprovoked. The EU wants the US to go to war with Russia because they don't want their own sons to die eliminating the only major opposition to globalist domination of the entire universe.

My Reaction: Russia should take everything up the Dnieper. The Russian half of the country will be far freer than they are now. It will be a tremendous improvement for the lives of everyone on the planet. The US definitely should not intervene. It would be like Russia intervening in a war between the US and Canada.



Bozo's Harem abducted even more people. Oblahblah still doesn't care enough to do more than let his wife invent a #hashtag. Here's one for you: #saveyourbreath

My Reaction: Didn't I just give it?



Tens of thousands of illegals, styled as yuuuuth, including over 24,000 adult males who need free underwear badly, are spreading STDs throughout the camps with their incessant sexual activity, and are gang members covered head to foot in gang tattoos, walked over the border and now ICE has to take care of them. These felons, mostly from Guatemala and Honduras, are here because someone, probably Eric Holder, told them the US is easy to sneak into and now is the perfect time to do it. This criminal piece of shit, this traitor who should be hanged by the neck until he is dead, who has violated the law every chance he can, who has broken every part of the Constitution there is, who advises the attorneys general of all the 50 states to commit felonies by not enforcing laws they don't like, is one of the evilest men on the planet. He absolutely is. He's one of the worst criminals we have in this country. Hundreds of drug resistant diseases that were wiped out in this country a century ago have now been reintroduced by this flood of humanity. This is exactly what happened when the Roman empire collapsed. Tens of thousands of Visigoths just crossed the border and Rome let them stay and within 20 years they burned Rome to the ground and the empire that had ruled the world for 12 centuries crumbled to dust. The same thing happened to China, and the empires of the Americas, and Egypt, and every single time a huge population just migrated to another civilisation that civilisation collapsed. Every time. But no one will listen because they want to watch the slut-dashians slip on a banana peal and expose themselves, or they want to listen to some racist rapper complain about racism while being the biggest racist on the planet, or they want to install six types of new lavatories in public schools for kids who think they're werewolves and Martians. That's what passes for news today. There hasn't been this much turmoil in the world since the Second World War and people are campaigning for "bathroom equality" as if that's more important than the thousands of veterans dying for lack of medical treatment, or the real possibility of ten dollar gas because barbarians have captured the Iraqi oil fields and are building towers of decapitated heads, or the seventeen trillion dollars of debt that the US will NEVER pay off, or diseases my grandparents didn't even have to worry about coming back with a vengeance. None of that matters. The hundreds of thousands of people dying and suffering in the world don't matter as long as one kid gets to make a thousand kids uncomfortable by using the bathroom of his choice. That's what's really important.



Well y'all can go to Hell, because I'm out of here. As soon as I save up a little bit of money I'm leaving and I'm not looking back.

Why We Must Fight Against Child Protective Services

A CPS whistle blower lays down the case why CPS is probably the greatest evil in the United States and why it should be abolished. Three big reasons: 1. the state owns your children and can do with them what they want; 2. CPS is unconstitutional, violating amendments 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 14; 3. CPS gets more money for the more children they abduct, just like the prison-industrial complex gets more money for the more people they incarcerate; 4. children abducted by CPS are six times more likely to die then if they were left with their supposedly abusive parents.

Runs 10 minutes.

The Land of the Disappearing Buddha

A look at Zen in Japan (37 years ago). Runs 52 minutes.

Suspicion Regarding Prahlad Jani

You might remember the famous ascetic who went fifteen days without eating or drinking with no adverse health effects. The octogenarian from Gujarat makes the claim of not taking food or water since the age of eleven, 72 years. Jani appears in the documentary The Boy with Divine Powers about "Buddha Boy" Dharma Sanga (Palden Dorje), in which he is compared to the then explosively popular young Nepalese monk who had fasted for six months under a tree. Here is a clip from that program (runs 9:31):







He also appeared in a film In The Beginning there was Light about breatharianism, the supposed ability to subsist off of nothing but sunlight. One Swiss woman watched the film then starved herself to death in spite of the film's warnings not to give up eating. Here is a clip from that program (runs 8:30):







Well, here is a story from 2010 that I just discovered from ABC News. It comes with an accompanying video (runs 6:17):




ABC US News | ABC Celebrity News



Now, the article does appear to be an assassination piece by skep-cock Sanal Edamaruku, head of the Indian Irrationalist Association. As I mentioned previously, the term "rationalist" means someone who believes true knowledge cannot
be attained through the senses, only through the rational mind. This is
in sharp contrast with people like Edamaruku who believes that the mind
doesn't exist, that everything is dead matter, and that knowledge can
only come from the senses. Fundamaterialist skep-dick debunkers like to
hijack the word "rationalist" and "rational" to mean its opposite, just
like they like to hijack the word "nothing" to mean "the quantum vacuum
that has existed forever into the past".



In the article lies are made about Sai Baba being "debunked" in youtube videos (the videos are of such poor quality that several professional magicians affirm it is impossible to draw any conclusions one way or the other). It also makes the totally bullshit assertion that belief in miracles is holding India back from "progress" (you know, "progressive"*, like a disease). "Progress" into what exactly I'm not sure. Red China under Mao's cultural revolution, the moral asshole of the universe that is Belgium where it is legal to murder ("euthanize") your children and parents when they become too much of a hassle for you, or maybe a Brave New World where everyone is drugged and brainwashed by the all powerful government? Because we all know that there has never been a single godless country that turned evil.



But I dye grass.



From the article: "On a tour of the "cave," as Jani called it -- actually a comfortable studio apartment -- "Nightline's" cameras caught sight of a working refrigerator. When asked about it, one of his minders immediately became defensive and said we could not look inside."



That is very suspicious. It is not proof of fraud, as the refrigerator could be there for any number of reasons (for the benefit of his handlers, who are mere mortals, who still need food or possibly medicine or insulin that requires refrigeration), but it is suspicious that a man who claims to have not eaten in seven decades has a refrigerator in his apartment. It's one piece of evidence against the two medical tests where Jani fasted for several days. Certainly I don't think it's possible to draw any conclusions. But it is interesting.











*You can't spell "progressive" without "SS"

2114

What will the world look like 100 years from now? Taking clues from the past century can provide us with a simple yet fairly accurate assessment of the next century.



A short video that makes an astute observation regarding basic human nature in a fun way.

Dating Anything

More along the lines of Dreams of Genesis and Dating Creation.



You meet a man in front of a very old looking house. He says the house has been in his family for ten generations and is over 400 years old. It sure looks old. The cobblestone steps are worn from thousands of footfalls, the wall around the property is covered with vines, the stucco is peeling in places, the wood creaks, there is a smell of mildew inside the house. You might notice that the floor boards are much wider than they are cut today. The walls may be solid construction, filled with earth between layers of brick. To all your senses the house may appear to be four centuries old.



However, appearances can be deceiving. You should be very skeptical of your thoughts and perceptions. What you think you see, what you think you want, it all may be false.



Every day you dream you create a whole world in minutes. That world might appear to be very old. An old house you see may have an occupant that tells you the illustrious history of the estate, but that house that looks four centuries old didn't exist five minutes ago.



It would be very difficult to tell the difference between a house that is 400 years old and a house that was created minutes ago to be 400 years old. It may be impossible. Even inventing a time machine would not be able to answer the problem, because the very act of going back in time changes history, so you can never then observe the unaltered original timeline. There would be no "original" timeline separate from the altered timeline, just one timeline in which you went back in time.  That's why I would place a limitation on the power of time machines. It may be that you can never travel back to a time before the time machine was first turned on, otherwise you would change history by bringing the time machine to a time before it existed. A time machine could never do anything that would negate its own existence, and so it could never go back in time before it itself existed.



This goes back to the problem of dating anything that was never observed. The house, you can say people observed it. The owner may claim to be tenth generation family living on an old plot of land given to his ancestors. There may well be documentation corroborating the story. Very well. For practical reasons it would be wise to accept the story. It can't be proven, not apodictically, not to the same rigor as self awareness. I know I exist; it's self evident. But other minds, the external world, all that, it's a matter of faith. And so it's a matter of faith that this house has been in this man's family for four centuries.





I guess you could say this relates to a problem that has
irked me since I first heard it. What if this moment you were the first
being to have a conscious thought? All your memories are fake, created
this very moment. Your entire life never happened, you only think you
have. Can you prove or disprove this?



The world, on the other hand, has not been observed. There are no records left by past observers we take on faith as other minds. There is no difference between a world that is a billion years old, a world that is a million years old created to look like it's a billion years old, and a world that was created yesterday to appear a billion years old. How do you create something a billion years old? How do you create a world as old as it appears in your dreams every night? How would you create the Matrix to appear older than it really is?



What about radioactive decay? That can't be faked, can it? Let's suppose that geology can be faked, so we can't use stratigraphy. Geologic layers can be rearranged. It's not that uncommon to read science fiction with alien races powerful enough to create planets from scratch. But isotopic ratios can't be faked, can they? Why not? We're talking about a sufficiently powerful being, aliens, God, Descartes' evil demon, whoever. Why not manipulate the isotopic ratios in every substance to appear younger or older than they really are?



Some people would argue God would never deceive us like that, but is it deception? Is the intention to deceive? Are you deceiving yourself in your dreams? To deceive is to make one believe something that is not true, but what if you're not supposed to believe the world is real? What if you're supposed to know it's fake and the real deception is the deception we perpetrate on ourselves when we believe in the world? Think of it like a movie. You know it's fake, but it's rousing good fun. The deception is when you convince yourself the movie is real and you get scared walking home at night that the killer on the screen might be after you.



Why does the house in the dream appear to be 400 years old? Maybe because it's fun. It's not deception if it's a game. Why does the world appear to be billions of years old? Maybe because an older world is more fun.



And that's where mysticism comes in. That's where waking up comes in. Then you know the world isn't real. Does that make life any easier? No, it makes life harder because you contemplate going along with all the people still living in the dream, following the motions; you can never go back, never accept the world as real again, and if you're not having any fun to begin with then you wonder why you keep beating your head against the wall playing a game you despise. Life doesn't get any easier when you wake up, but it does get funnier. And one of the things you laugh at most is yourself.