Top Ten of 2015

2015 seems to have been the most popular year for The Urban Mystic, accounting for 1/5 of all the lifetime visitors. As usual, here are the top ten stories of the year in order.



1. Integral Christ



In 2015 Easter took place on the same day as the first Easter in 33 AD. The last time this happened was 1942, and it won't happen again until 2026, so I took the time to create a very big, detailed piece about what an integral version of Christianity would look like, complete with miracles, the crucifixion, and resurrection. I explain why all three are necessary in any version of Christianity, first, second, or third tier, and why it is intellectually dishonest to claim otherwise.



2. The Myth of Cultural Relativity



All cultures are not equal. Most cultures accomplished little, or nothing, while others changed the world in spectacular ways.



3. The Dovekeepers



In April a made for TV movie about the massacre at Masada during the Jewish Revolt was produced by the same people who made the hit series The Bible. And they made the Romans look like the good guys. The movie is about two women who survive and tell Josephus what happened, and they are the biggest whores on the planet. The only thing they do is seduce married men and have sex with them, then those married men get killed and they seduce even more married men. They never once think to find a man who is single. They are adulterous whores who are glorified in this two part Harlequin softcore porn film.



4. Is Peace on Earth Possible?



Kriyananda explains why the yuga cycle gives him hope that peace on Earth is possible in the future.



5. Why "Taxing the Rich" Doesn't Work



Everyone wants to tax "the rich", but the definition of just who is "the rich" is totally dependent on whom you are asking. No one, no matter how much money they make, will admit to being rich. Similarly, just what is the "fair share" that "the rich" must pay? No one has a percentage or dollar amount, it's always just "more than they are paying now". I outline eight reasons why the rich pay no taxes, and why raising tax rates only ever hurt the poor and middle class.



6. Overpopulation is Officially Bullshit



The New York Times admits that there is no overpopulation problem! The real problems are below replacement birth rates and improper distribution of resources.



7. Meditation Problems and Benefits



Bullshit psychiatrists say meditation is evil and you should take a pill so that they can stay in business. I then explain how meditation works, the real reason you should meditate, the real reason people encounter problems with meditation, and how to overcome those problems.



8. The Pyramid Deception



There is a lie that is oft perpetuated by archaeologists who are members of the scientistic magisterium. It is claimed that prior to the invention of modern building techniques and materials the ONLY way to build tall structures was to build a pyramid, and that's why pyramids were built by many ancient civilisations. This is a lie on its face.



It was entirely possible to build tall towers with straight walls and I provide many examples in this masterpiece.



You can't explain away why ancient people all over the world built pyramids. Why did people all over the world build pyramids? We do not know. I am not here to propose an alternate hypothesis, merely to disprove the predominant hypothesis that pyramids exist all over the world because people were too stupid to build straight sided towers.



9. China Sends Aircraft Carrier to Syria



The balance of global power has shifted.



This September China, in alliance with Russia and Syria, sent a stiff rebuke to the US and the US created proxy ISIS. The US created ISIS, along with staging a coup in Ukraine, to destroy Russia by proxy. Well, Russia is not backing down, and neither is China.



10. Uri Geller's Tricks?



The subject that made The Urban Mystic famous! The question over whether Uri Geller uses trickery to bend spoons is left to the reader's interpretation, but a new video surfaced, starring our old friend Bob Couttie, that may show Geller fooling around. The video is of poor quality and I have not drawn any conclusions from it.









This year has been so big that a lot of really good stuff didn't make it into the top ten.





Richard Rose: Zen and Death

Richard Rose talks on everything. He talks about the four categories of mystical experiences, how society conditions us to believe lies regarding who we are and what death is, the near death experience, and the importance of finding the Truth and who we really are. We exist before we are born and continue to exist after we die. The purpose of life is finding this Truth out for ourselves through direct experience. Runs 1 hour 10 minutes.

The Worse Devils of Our Nature

Despite what Steven Pinker says, the 20th century was unquestionably the most violent in history, with more people killed than were even alive for most of human history (800 million people were killed in the 20th century, human population was usually around 400 - 500 million until around 1800), and with so many dead in 2015 and wars raging across the world, things don't look to be getting better any time soon.



A Tale of Two Rebirths



There are two models for how rebirth works. In the old model, adopted in some form by pretty much every major religion in the world, souls begin in ignorance and must grow through a series of lifetimes until they reach perfection. In the "new age" version, souls begin totally omniscient and incarnate on Earth for the lulz, to experience things that spirits can't experience, like cancer, war, famine, rape, and murder. Why a soul would want to experience these things is never explained. Human psychology seems to refute the notion, but some (far from all) channeled material suggests that enlightened soul psychology is totally different from human psychology. Of course, NDEs and most mediumistic communication indicates that the deceased pretty much think just like they did when they were alive, instead of being instantly enlightened. If I had to bet I would say that the very low level trickster spirits are the ones coming through saying we're all omniscient and we come to Earth to suffer, as it goes against all the evidence from enlightened sages on Earth, human psychology, reason, common sense, reports from NDEs and reports from other spirits.



Suffering and The Meaning of Life

God did not create the world to experience things, like suffering or separation, like some cosmic version of the TV series Jackass. God created a perfect world as an outpouring of love. We created this illusory flawed world of suffering out of pride, to prove we were more powerful than God, and we hide here until we overcome our pride and return to God.



Islam: The Untold Story



Tom Holland suggests that the true origins of Islam and Muhammad came not from Arabia, but from the Negev, and it was not until much later that the Mecca story was invented to further distance Islam from Christianity and Judaism. This could explain why the early sites are being destroyed, not because of the danger of idolatry, but because those sites were fakes, built centuries later, and the Wahhabis in the Saudi government don't want anyone - especially devout Muslims - from discovering that the buildings and cemeteries date from well after the life of Muhammad and his companions. It could also explain why the Quran makes more sense when read in Syriac (the language used in the Negev and Sinai at the time) than when read in Arabic.

Later on fragments of the Quran were discovered that were dated to a time before Muhammad was born.

This is more evidence in support of the hypothesis that the text of the Quran comes from Syriac Christian sources in the Negev that were altered by Muhammad or someone else to justify the Arab conquest of the region. This is why the sites associated with early Islam are being destroyed by the Saudi government and others, not to prevent people from worshiping at Muhammad's birthplace, but to hide the fact that the religion of Islam was created after the political movement had established itself, to to distance it from its Christian and Jewish roots.



Biblical Archaeology

The central dogma of biblical archaeology is based on a faulty chronology. Some scholars invented a chronology when events of the Bible should have taken place, and when they find the evidence of events that were described in the Bible they find those events happened a few centuries earlier than when the chronology says they should have. Instead of doing what any rational being would do, which is to revise the chronology, the biblical archaeologists become even more entrenched in the chronology. They proclaim the Bible to be myth and the artefacts that were discovered to belong to a new, previously unknown period in history. This is the exact opposite of how science works. If the data do not fit the hypothesis it is the hypothesis that must be revised to fit the data. Instead, biblical archaeologists revise the data to fit the hypothesis.

A Letter from Michael

A letter from a young Marine named Michael who was wounded during the Korean War. Runs 10 minutes. Transcript below.






Merry Christmas everybody! My name is Lee Allan, and the story you are
about to hear has become a Christmas tradition. It's been broadcast for
over 25 years on radio stations all over America. The story was given
to me by Ed Harding, news director of a radio station much like this
one. It was a copy of a letter, written by a young Marine named
Michael, who was hospitalised after being wounded on a Korean
battlefield. The letter was written home to his mother, but it was
first seen and read by a Navy Chaplin. In the letter, Michael describes
what happened to him on that lonely, frozen battlefield. When the
Chaplin first saw the letter, he talked with the boy's mother, the
sergeant in charge of the boy's patrol, and the patrolled members
themselves. Privately, they will all still tell you that what you are
about to hear is a true story. Recently read the letter at Christmas
time and let it stand on its own merit. The sergeant, the patrol
members, and Michael are real people. The story is a letter, a copy of
the original. A letter from Michael.





Dear Mom,





I wouldn't dare write this letter to anyone but you because no one else
will believe it. Maybe even you will find it hard. But I've got to
tell somebody. First off, I'm in a hospital. Now don't worry. You
hear me? Don't…don't worry. I…I was wounded, but I'm okay. You
understand? Okay. The doctor says I'll be up and around in a month,
but that isn't what I want to tell you. Remember when I joined the
Marines last year? Remember when I left, how you told me to say a
prayer to St. Michael everyday? You really didn't have to tell me that.
Ever since I can remember, you always told me to pray to St. Michael
the Arc Angel. You even named me after him. Well I always have. When I
got to Korea, I prayed even harder. Remember the prayer you taught me?
"Michael, Michael of the morning. Fresh court of heaven adorning."
You know the rest of it. Well I said it everyday. Sometimes when I was
marching. Sometimes, resting. But always before I went to sleep. I
even got some of the other fellas to say it. Well, one day I was with
an advance detail, way up forward, in the front lines. I was plotting
along, in the bitter cold. My breath was like cigar smoke. I thought I
knew every guy on the patrol, but along side of me comes another Marine
I had never met before. He was bigger than any Marine I had ever seen.
He must have been six foot four, and built in proportion. It gave me a
feeling of security to have such a buddy near. Anyway, there we were,
trudging along, rest of the patrol spread out. Just to start a
conversation I said, "Cold! Ain't it?" And then I laughed. Here I was,
with a good chance of getting killed any minute, and I'm talking about
the weather. My companion seemed to understand. I heard him laugh
softly. I looked at him. "I've never seen you before. I thought I
knew every man in the outfit." "I just joined at the last minute," he
replied. "The name is Michael." "Is that so?" I said. "That's my
name, too." "I know," he said. "And then we're on, "Michael, Michael
of the morning." I was too amazed to say anything for a minute. How
did he know my name? And the prayer that you had taught me. Then I
smiled to myself. "Heh". Every guy in the outfit knew about me. Hadn't
I taught the prayer to anyone who'd listen? Why now and then, they
even referred to me as St. Michael. Neither of us spoke for a time, and
then he broke the silence. "We're gonna have some trouble up ahead.
He must have been in some fine physical shape, for he was breathing so
lightly, I couldn't see his breath. Mine poured out in grape clouds.
There was no smile on his face now. Trouble ahead, I thought to myself.
Well, with the enemy all around us, that's no great revelation. Snow
began to fall, in great thick globs. In a brief moment, the whole
countryside was blotted out and I was marching in a white fog of wet,
sticky particles. My companion disappeared. "Michael!" I shouted in
sudden alarm. I felt his hand on my arm. His voice was rich and
strong. "This will stop shortly." His prophecy proved to be correct.
In a few moments the snow stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The sun
was a hard shining disc. I looked back for the rest of the patrol.
There was no one in sight. We lost them in that heavy fall of snow. I
looked ahead as we came over a little rise. Mom, my heart stopped.
There were seven of them and their padded pants and jackets and funny
little hats, only there wasn't anything funny about them now. Seven
rifles were aimed at us. "Down Michael!" I screamed and hit the frozen
earth. I heard those rifles fire almost as one. I heard the bullets.
But there was Michael. Still standing. Mom, those guys couldn’t have
missed. Not at that range. I expected to see him literally blown to
bits. But there he stood, making no effort to fire himself. He was
paralysed with fear. It happens sometimes, mom, even to the very
bravest. He was…he was like a bird, fascinated by a snick. At least,
that's what I thought then. I jumped up to pull him down, and felt a
sudden flame in my chest. I often wondered what it felt like to be hit.
Now I know. I remember feeling strong arms above me. Arms that laid
me, ever so gently, on a pillow of snow. I opened my eyes for one last
look. I was dying. Maybe I was even dead. I remember thinking well,
this isn't so bad. Maybe I was looking into the sun. Maybe I was in
shock. But it seemed I saw Michael standing erect again, only this
time, his face was shining with terrible splendour. As I say, maybe it
was the sun in my eyes, but he seemed to change as I watched him; he
grew, bigger. His arms stretched out wide. Maybe it was the snow
falling again, but there was a brightness around him; like the wings of
an angel. In his hand was a sword. A sword that flashed with a million
lights. And that’s the last thing I remember until the rest of the
fellas came up and found me. I don't know how much time had passed, but
now and then, I had a moment's respite from the pain. I remember
telling them that the enemy was just ahead. "Where's Michael?" I asked.
I saw them look at one another. "Where's who?" asked one. "Michael".
"Michael, that big Marine that I was walking with just before that big
snow squall hit us". "Kid," said the sergeant. "You weren't walking
with anyone. I had my eyes on you the whole time. You were getting too
far out. I was just gonna call you in when you disappeared in the
snow." He looked at me, curiously. "How'd you do it kid?" "How'd I do
what?" I asked, half angry, despite my wound. "This big Marine named
Michael and I were just…" "Son," said the sergeant kindly. "I picked
this outfit out myself, and there just ain't another Michael in it.
You’re the only Mike in it." He paused for a moment. "Just how'd you
do it, kid? We heard shots. There hasn't been a shot fired from your
rifle. And there isn't a bit of lead in them seven bodies over the hill
there. I didn't say anything. What could I say? I could only look,
open-mouthed, with amazement. It was then the sergeant spoke again.
"Kid," he said gently. "Every one of those seven bodies over the hill
there was killed, by a sword stroke." That's all I could tell you mom.
As I say, it may have been the sun in my eyes. It may have been the
cold, or the pain. But that’s what happened.





Love,

Michael

Oak Island Mystery Deepens

The famous (or infamous) Oak Island near Nova Scotia, Canada, has been one of the world's most mysterious places ever since a young man
Daniel McGinnis and his friends found a depression marked by a rope and tackle in 1795. They dug on the spot, discovering a very deep pit with alternating layers of earth and wooden planks. Over the centuries many people died and fortunes were lost digging on Oak Island. The pit, over 200 feet deep, is connected to the sea via tunnels that flooded the pit with sea water once people dug too far down. Whoever dug the pit also engineered the entire island to safeguard whatever was at the bottom (or just to be a jerk and fool future treasure seekers). Gold links and paper with writing have been discovered in the pit, along with a stone covered with undeciphered markings discovered 90 feet down.



Various hypotheses have been put forth to explain the existence of the "Money Pit". Some say it was Blackbeard's treasure, or the survivors of a Spanish galleon hiding their loot from the British, or the Knights Templar buried the Holy Grail there, or proof that Francis Bacon was the real Shakespeare. Or some say it's just a sinkhole that somehow, conveniently, filled up with wooden planks every ten feet.



A new discovery could answer the mystery for good, or maybe just deepen it. Oak Island, which is now connected to the mainland via a causeway and is thus no longer technically an island, may have been visited by the Romans.



An ancient Roman sword was discovered in the waters near the island decades ago by a fisherman who hid it away in a closet somewhere. Now that he's died, his daughter's husband (the current owner now that his wife and daughter are also dead) has handed the sword over to archaeologists who have confirmed that it is a genuine Roman artefact.





This ancient sword clearly depicts Heracles with his legs spread apart, the blade between them.



J. Hutton Pulitzer, the man heading the investigation, says there is a Roman shipwreck off the coast of Oak Island where the sword came from, and that this will rewrite history. Skep-dicks claim that some wealthy collector brought the sword there during a boating trip and just dropped it overboard, but as Pulitzer points out, if you dropped the sword you paid a hefty price for in 20 foot deep water wouldn't you just jump in after it? This isn't like the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean, this is shallow water off the coast of a tiny island.



The wreck has been surveyed, but getting permission to dive it will be difficult. Governments really don't like it when rogue archaeologists buck the status quo. Remember when 200,000 year old human remains were discovered in Mexico? The Mexican army shut the site down permanently and Virginia Steen-McIntyre had her career ruined. A lie was cooked up saying the remains were only 35,000 years old.



Pre-Columbian Atlantic travel should not be controversial in the least, but it is. We know about the cocaine mummies, and the travels of Hanno the Navigator, the Carthaginian explorer who sailed along the coast of Africa all the way to Mt. Cameroon and discovered gorillas. The Pharaoh Necho I commissioned the Phoenicians to circumnavigate Africa, and they correctly described the sun rising and setting in the wrong direction, strong evidence the story is true as it was not known at the time that Africa extended into the southern hemisphere. Thor Heyerdal proved it was possible to travel across the ocean using only a raft made of reeds, recapitulating the voyages of the Polynesians. Columbus himself relied on Portuguese maps to travel to the new world, that they had ventured to 70 years earlier.






Ancient peoples traveled across the oceans all the time. It is modern conceit that says it did not happen. The question remains whether this genuine Roman artefact is proof of Roman visitation of the new world, or whether it really was Thurston Howell accidentally dropping his collector's item overboard during a three hour pleasure cruise. We'll have to wait for Pulitzer and his team to get permission to dive the wreck. Until then it betrays gross arrogance to scoff and claim that such a thing is mere fantasy.

Is Peace on Earth Possible?

Kriyananda explains why the yuga cycle gives him hope that peace on Earth is possible in the future.



Now, Kriyananda is not some up in the air "crazy wisdom" guru who uses religion to disguise socialism. He does not go out and promote hedonism under the guise of tantra, though he has made a number of gross errors in his life sexually. He has stated that government spending is responsible for collapsing the economy, he has built several successful communities around the world that have thrived for decades, he is not a cultural Marxist or an economic Marxist, but he does understand the value of community and working together rather than competing.



How can we get peace on Earth? The realist answer is that the old guard of super rich super greedy New World Order elite need to die out. People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and the Coca Cola Brothers and Mark Suckerface. People for whom there is not enough money in the universe. People who would sell their own mother for a penny and commit treason to get a no-bid contract. Then the younger people can learn from the example of Ananda and move toward communal living.

The Truth About The Crusades

Stefan Molyneux explains why the Crusades, a defensive action after 400 years of Muslim invasions, were good, why European civilisation is good, and why no one talks about the Muslim slave trade, which lasted longer than the Atlantic slave trade (the last country on Earth to officially outlaw slavery was Kuwait in 1977), was worse, and led to more deaths.



Runs 33 minutes.

Bush Nazi Ties

Prescott Bush, father of George H. W. Bush, and grandfather of both George W. "Capital" Bush and Jeb "George Push" Bush, was a big time Nazi money launderer and lawyer. He was a profoundly evil man who died in 1972 and went to Hell. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush is a hardcore evil Luciferian from a long line of evil Luciferians. The Bush family is evil and should never be allowed back into office.

The Pyramid Deception

There is a lie that is oft perpetuated by archaeologists who are members of the scientistic magisterium. It is claimed that prior to the invention of modern building techniques and materials the ONLY way to build tall structures was to build a pyramid, and that's why pyramids were built by many ancient civilisations. This is a lie on its face.



It was entirely possible to build tall towers with straight walls. Below I provide numerous examples. It is important to address a small issue right away before proceeding. Many towers do have tapering sides. That does not negate my thesis for two reasons.



1. The taller a structure rises the more it must deal with wind resistance, as winds are stronger the higher up you go. The best solution, as seen in modern buildings such as the Burj Khalifa, is to taper the building as you go up. No one would claim that a tower like the Burj Khalifa or the Empire State Building are pyramids, but they do taper to reduce the surface area that is being bombarded by heavy winds.



2. Reducing the thickness of the walls as you go up allows you to build much taller. The base of any structure can only support a finite weight before collapsing. If you taper the structure you can make it taller than if you kept the walls a uniform thickness.



Since I intend to demonstrate that it was possible to build tall towers using pre-modern construction techniques and materials, I will only list pre-modern structures, those built before 1500.



When people think of pyramids they probably think of the Great Pyramid, and who knows how that thing was built? Maybe it was aliens. Probably not, but if ancient aliens didn't exist then how did they build everything? What people don't know is that most pyramids are nowhere near that impressive. Pyramids, for the most part, are just heaps of rubble and earth faced with stone. This is how the pyramids of the Americas were built. It's not all that difficult to create a big heap of dirt and put stones on top. While the Great Pyramid is 455 feet tall, the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico only stands at 216 feet. Pyramids throughout southern Egypt and Sudan are usually no taller than 60 feet.



The Minaret of Jam

In 1190 in central Afghanistan the Ghurid kings built a brick minaret 203 feet tall. Before anyone says "Bricks? Bricks are modern, build it out of stone!" I will point out that the ziggurats of Babylon, some of the earliest pyramids in the world, were built not of stone, but of fired bricks.  The minaret is composed of five sections, each smaller than the other, but each section itself has very straight sides.



The Qutub Minar

1220. The Sultan of Delhi, taking inspiration from the Minaret of Jam, dismantled several Hindu temples to make a 240 foot tall victory minaret. This tower does taper quite a bit, but it is far from a pyramid. It is a tower much like a lighthouse, also with five sections, built without steam power or steel cranes.



The Towers of the Himalaya

Throughout eastern Tibet and south-western China, there are hundreds of stone towers built, it is thought, within a 400 year period around 1400. It is believed they were built by numerous different civilisations for different purposes, family pride, signal towers, protection from Mongol invasions, etc. Most are between 100 and 200 feet tall, with straight sides, and either rectilinear or star-shaped bases.



The Towers of Bologna

The rich families of Bologna, in terror of vendettas, built tall towers to spy on one another. Of the hundred or more towers in the city, the most famous are known as the Two Towers. Built of stone, brick, and wood, the towers are believed to have been built on average over ten years. The shorter Garisenda Tower stands at 159 feet and leans heavily to one side. It was much taller, but the top had to be removed to prevent collapse. The taller Asinelli Tower is 323 feet and overlooks its shorter neighbor. Both were built between 1109 to 1185.



Lincoln Cathedral

The medieval cathedrals were built over many centuries, using man-powered cranes and often had to be rebuilt numerous times due to collapse. There are a few very tall cathedrals, some even taller than the Great Pyramid, but, while most were started centuries ago, most were not finished until the late 19th century. This disqualifies them from this list. One very prominent exception is Lincoln Cathedral. Built in 1311, the central spire rose to 525 feet high, towering over the Great Pyramid even at its greatest, before erosion and thieves stole some of its height. A heavy storm tore down the spire in 1549, but the parts of the tower still remaining stood at 271 feet high. With dead straight walls, it is impossible to claim that the only means of reaching fantastic heights was to build pyramids.



So far all these examples have been from the ADs, a good three thousand years after the Great Pyramid was built. This might turn some people off. "We want ANCIENT towers, not merely pre-modern towers! It was IMPOSSIBLE! Pyramids were inevitable!!!!1"



I've saved the best for last.



The Lighthouse of Alexandria

The original Seventh Wonder of the World. Built in 280 BC, the lighthouse stood at Alexandria Harbor, the gateway to the greatest city in the world, built by Alexander the Great himself and governed by his general Ptolemy. Built in three sections, with very gently sloping walls, the lighthouse rose to at least 400 feet high, almost as tall as the Great Pyramid itself! The tower stood until 1480, only 12 years before Columbus' history altering voyage, when it was dismantled to built the fort at Qaitbay by the Sultan of Egypt.








People were capable of building tall towers before modern construction, they were not required to build pyramids. There was nothing to stop ancient people from building perfect vertical walls, yet many decided to still build pyramids. Why? We don't know. The ubiquity of pyramids all over the world is a truly unexplained mystery.



It is interesting that the same people who say that to suggest a lost civilisation such as Atlantis or alien intervention is to insult the intelligence of the brown people who made these monuments, themselves insult the intelligence of ancient peoples by suggesting that the ONLY way to build tall structures was to build pyramids. It is another sign of the hypocrisy of these people.



You can't explain away why ancient people all over the world built
pyramids. Why did people all over the world build pyramids? Say it with
me, it's my favourite phrase: "WE DO NOT KNOW." We do not know. I am not here to propose an alternate hypothesis, merely to disprove the predominant hypothesis that pyramids exist all over the world because people were too stupid to build straight sided towers. I have provided you with six examples of ancient towers, now you can let the pyramid deception die.

The Worst Generation

Stefan Molyneux explains why the Baby Boomers are the worst generation ever, who got everything from the previous generation who built the US into the greatest economic powerhouse in the history of the world, squandered everything, did the worst job ever of raising the current generation and blames their kids for the problems they as parents caused, and never accept blame for any of it.



A lot of it is similar to what I talked about in Integral Politics.



Runs 37 minutes.

Science and the Survival of Consciousness after Death

Dr. Bruce Greyson in a 2010 talk about survival of consciousness. Runs 42 minutes. Some of it seems familiar. Maybe there is overlap with the last presentation, maybe from another interview.

Stuart Hameroff on Quantum Consciousness

Dr. Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist and philosopher, is the co-creator, along with Dr. Roger Penrose, of the Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) theory of consciousness. Orch-OR postulates consciousness as a quantum phenomenon located mainly in the microtubules of the brain. As coherent quantum information, consciousness can exist outside the brain, possibly indefinitely, retaining its unique identity, and might even be able to enter a new brain, accounting for reincarnation. Orch-OR may be unique in that it may be the only materialistic explanation for consciousness that can account for survival after death and the effects of psychedelic drugs and intense states of meditation. Dr. Hameroff also proposes an experiment for testing the hypothesis, involving different regimens of anesthetic drugs.



Dr. Hameroff explains the Orch-OR model in greater detail in this one hour interview.

Sai Baba Light Body Scam

Two men who were formerly associated with Sathya Sai Baba have taken on a new venture of scamming people out of money by claiming Baba's "light body" is speaking directly to them, something Sai Baba said he would never do. Narasimha Murthy and Madhu Sudan Naidu are con artists.

Is Consciousness Produced by the Brain?

Dr. Bruce Greyson, professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, gives a one hour talk on evidence that consciousness can exist independent of the brain, including deathbed lucidity, patients with little brain tissue, children remembering past lives, and the near death experience.  Followed by questions.



From the Cosmology and Consciousness Conference - Mind and Matter in 2011.

Expansiveness

Swami Kriyananda talks about other worlds, the limitations of the body, and the relationship between the frontal lobes and superconsciousness. Runs 19 minutes.

Michael Savage Unleashed

Alex Jones interviews Michael Savage, the brightest light in the darkness in this country. Runs 26 minutes.







Some people in the comments criticise Savage's view on marijuana, I think without knowing what it actually is. As a regular listener and someone who has read a few of his books, I think I have a better understanding of where he stands. Michael Savage smoked marijuana for many years, and he didn't like the effect it had on him. He doesn't want to put people in jail for smoking weed, although he doesn't want to encourage anyone to smoke it. Drug dealers, on the other hand, he wants put away, in large part for targeting children. Savage was an early advocate for the medical use of marijuana, and he is well aware of the health benefits for people who need it, but he has opposed a number of people (such as George Soros) who tried to use medical marijuana as a Trojan horse to push the recreational usage.



Let's not fool ourselves, weed is not an intellectual drug. It is an anesthetic. It anesthetises pain in the body and in the mind. Sometimes that's fantastic, and if you're sick and you need that, then more power to you. But these are dangerous times and we need mental clarity more than ever. Savage continues to discuss the dangers of legal drugs, especially the psychotropics that are given to kids to turn them into mind-numbed slaves. As Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World, the puppet masters of society will use drugs to enslave the masses. Huxley was not warning us, he was a member of the New World Order, and he was so bold as to tell us their plans because they knew that very few people would try to stop them.



Drugs themselves are not bad, when used properly and responsibly. The problem is that the global elite are using drugs to control the masses and make them servile.



Michael Savage mentions his new book Government Zero. Now, I have put one of his books on the side of this page, because I've read it. I have not put up a link for Government Zero (yet), because I don't like to recommend books I have not read yet. But I will recommend the book here because Michael Savage is donating all the money he will get from the book in the form of college scholarships. And that is one of the reasons I really like Savage. He has made a lot of money, and he worked very hard for 40 years to get where he is today. He's not ashamed of his success. At the same time he knows when enough is enough. He doesn't need any more money. How many houses or cars or boats can one man own? And he can't take it with him, so he has decided to give it away to those who are most deserving. As a lifetime academic, who worked very hard paying his way through school, Savage has started giving out college scholarships to bright students who share the values of borders, language, and culture, so that they may grow up to be the next generation of successful scholars. I like that. Unlike Mark Suckerface or Bill Gates, for whom there is not enough money in the universe, Michael Savage realises that there is enough money, and he doesn't need any more. I really respect that.

The Seven Wonders

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus still existed after Columbus reached North America. It was disassembled between 1494 and 1530. It actually survived to the modern age but was destroyed to build a fort. The desire to kill people overwhelmed the desire to inspire humanity and celebrate the human spirit.



If one were to construct a list of the new seven wonders, what would they be? I can propose a few criteria:



1. It should be a permanent structure

2. Its design should be innovative for when it was built

3. Its construction should have been unbelievably difficult



Something easy, but tedious, should not be included. The Great Wall of China is just a row of bricks. Also as construction techniques improve the scale of the wonder should increase along with it. Building a 300 foot tall light house today would be very easy. To qualify as a wonder a structure should be wondrous. People should look at it and marvel that it was ever built at all.



I have thought of five of seven structures I would consider wonders.



New Seven Wonders

1. Giza Pyramid Complex
A complete map of the night sky, with the pyramids themselves as the stars of Orion (identified as Osiris) and the Nile as the Milky Way. The only member of the original seven wonders that still stands.

2. Borobudur
A one of a kind "learning machine" in Indonesia. After years of study, a student comprehends the meaning behind the hundreds of stone inscriptions on the spiral path up the monument and reaches enlightenment.

3. Leshan Giant Buddha
By far the largest pre-modern statue in the world.

4. Burj Khalifa
The tallest building ever.

5. Apollo 11 Landing Site (Sea of Tranquility, Moon)
The first (temporary) human habitation on another planet.

6. Undecided

7. Undecided



Potentials:

1. Kanishka's Stupa (Destroyed)
The tallest stupa ever built.

2. Sagrada Familia (Incomplete)
The greatest basilica in the world. Designed to perfectly combine ancient and modern architecture as well as elements from the human and natural world.

3. Hagia Sophia
Originally the largest church in the world, with the largest dome at the time enclosing the largest open space.

4. Larung Gar
Largest religious institution in the world, with over 40,000 monks and nuns.

New World Order: Blueprint of Madmen

Alex Jones documentary (40 minutes) on the global program to reduce human population by 90% through war, GMO crops, and vaccines. They use terrorism to keep us afraid and obedient while they steal all our freedom and plot to murder us. Governments have killed 262 million people in the 20th century, making them the worst killer of all time. And you trust them? It's okay for them to spy on you, you're doing nothing wrong.

Alex Jones Inflitrates Google

Alex Jones walks into a "public" event with a camera and the people at Google freak out even though there is a sign on the door that says everything inside the building is being recorded. When the masters video the slaves, when Google watches what you do or the NSA spies on you, that's to be worshiped by trendies. Sick, diseased freaks worship the NSA and Google. But when the average person videos you in public, which is legal to do, then trendies freak out. They want Google to video them, but they don't want Alex Jones to video them, because they have been conditioned to worship Google.



Video runs 10 minutes.

What is a Mantra?

Swami Kriyananada talks about mantras, sound, and the power of intention. Runs 13 minutes.

Alexander Seton, The Mysterious Alchemist

"Alexander Seton" also known as "The Cosmopolite", was a mysterious
alchemist whose career spanned 1602-1604, when he was apparently killed
by the ruler of Saxony for refusing to reveal the secret of the
Philosopher's Stone. A Polish alchemist Michał Sędziwój visited him in
prison and bribed a guard to let him escape. Alexander Seton allegedly
died a few days later, having never revealed his secret.



A few
years later, in 1618, another adept appeared in Europe, and again in
1666. I suspect the three men were the same person. It makes sense that a
man who is immortal would need to fake his death every few decades so
no one got suspicious.



In the video below Philip Coppens explores some of the places associted with the life of Alexander Seton.

Hitlery's Emails Found!

Hitlery Roddamn Clinton destroyed her illegal private server that was used to illegally release top secret documents in a brazen act that would have put any lesser government official in prison immediately. Thousands of top secret emails were destroyed so the FBI could not see what horribly illegal things she did in the worst scandal of any Secretary of State in US history.



Well now they were found! Tech company Datto Inc. was paid to backup the emails and they stored them on a cloud server that Hitlery Roddamn Clinton and her coven of bitches didn't have access to. Datto Inc. handed over all the emails to the FBI! Apparently none of Hitlery's minions knew the Datto cloud existed.



Maybe now we can get on to putting her in prison for life where she belongs.

Beginning of WWIII in Syria?

We already know that the CIA created ISIS. We know that Russia destroyed them in a week of bombing. Now, not to be made a fool of, the New World Order has decided to escalate from proxy war to outright war. British pilots now have been given the green light to shoot down Russian jets over Syria.



British pilots who feel their lives are threatened, are now permitted to launch air-to-air missiles at Russian jets. I don't even know what the British are doing there. They have no business in Syria, other than escorting the millions of fake refugees into Europe to transform the continent into Eurabia.



This seems to be evidence indicative of bad things on the horizon. This is Afghanistan all over again. The US is leading the way supporting Islamists in a proxy war against the Russians, and in ten years we'll have another 9/11, if not sooner.  Historical events recur and escalate.

Models of Colonialism Part 1

There were two main models for colonialism established over 500 years ago: the Spanish and the British. The differences in how these models operate can explain to a large part why former Spanish colonies have largely become failed states, despite being built out of great empires like the Maya and Inca, and why former British colonies have become hugely successful despite beginning as loose agglomerations of stone age tribes.



In part 2, if I ever get to it, I will look at the special case of former African colonies and why they have largely failed.

Milo Yiannopoulos Hates Feminism

Milo Yiannopoulos from Breitbart talks about why feminism is bullshit. Runs 14 minutes.

Climate Change is Caused by the Sun

Dr. David Evans from Australia's Greenhouse Office has discovered a fatal flaw in the climate models that everyone has been using for several decades to predict catestrophic warming that has not manifested. He corrected the error and all of a sudden everything became clear, the relationship between CO2 and warming, and the 18 year long cooling the Earth has been going through.

It turns out CO2 is only about one tenth as potent a greenhouse gas as was previously thought. Human activity has only a very tiny effect on warming.

“Yes, CO2 has an effect, but it’s about a fifth or tenth of what the IPCC says it is. CO2 is not driving the climate; it caused less than 20 per cent of the global warming in the last few decades."

The main driving factor in the Earth's climate is the Sun. This is why the ice caps on Mars were melting even though no humans are up there to pollute (the couple of solar powered robots on Mars produce zero emissions).

Dr. Evans predicts that the Earth will cool significantly over the next decade, something far worse than the warming disasters the IPCC and Algore predicted. A warmer world means greater biodiversity, faster growing and healthier vegitation, and an increase in crop yields. A colder world means deminishing crop yields and global population disruption from famine, epidemic, and cold itself. Only a few hundred people die from excess heat a year, whereas thousands die from freezing to death.

This is what I have been saying since I first researched global warming in 2004. This is what scientists who were once true-believers in the Church of Global Warming and have now become heretics have been saying. How many times do individuals have to discover the truth for themselves before the establishment starts to get it?

Equestria Girls: Friendship Games

How is sound coming out of Rainbow's electric guitar when it's not plugged into anything?



Evil Twi is the unibomber!



I find it hard to believe that she was able to create a magic detector having seen magic very briefly at best two times. There would have been no way to calibrate it. And when she touches the base of the statue ripples appear from the portal. When Pinkie Pie ran into it at the end of the first movie it was clear that the statue has turned completely to stone again. There should be no remnant of the portal left.



That city looks lazily done. The houses are bland and generic and the background is one solid piece. Sometimes that has been used to good effect in other cartoons, but it doesn't seem to fit here. It comes off looking rushed.



I don't like the idea of what appears to be rivals to mane six. The idea of "evil" counterparts again seems lazy. Rather than creating new characters let's just have anti-matter clones of everyone so everyone knows who they are and it saves a whole lot of time.



Hold on! Sunset has been on Earth for four years (she won that Fall Formal three times and lost the fourth to pony Twilight). How does she not know about Crystal Prep and yet everyone else does?



Principal Celestia announces the games happen every four years. Then how the hell does everyone except Sunset know about them so well, and how are they all so bitter? The last Friendship Games would have happened before they all entered high school. Maybe if a few of them have older siblings they would have heard about it, but if the games happen every four years they would have only seen a few in their lives, and they would have been little kids who wouldn't have properly understood or even cared about them. 8 minutes in and I'm not liking this premise at all. It's just so contrived.



There's a song where RD wastes a couple minutes. It seems hinted that she's friends with the head of the school band. I hope we see that expanded instead of just a one off moment.



Okay, so everyone at school knows about magic and Sunset being from Equestria. Evil Twi knows. How is it no one else does? If a magical being from another universe came to this Earth and there was a huge battle we've all seen E.T., we know what would happen. There would be no way to hide this from the world. The government would have come in and taken over. It would not end well.



Sunny needs a hug.



Evil Twi gets a much better song, but how is it she is singing in the hall and no one notices, or cares?



Why would the principal want Evil Twi to compete in a sport event when she should know she has no athletic ability? That does not make sense. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit. If it doesn't fit, you must quit. If winning is so important then Evil Twi is the last person the evil principal would want competing.



And I would say that CHS building a "reputation" is the understatement of the century. Even if they somehow managed to keep magic under wraps, which would have been impossible, it would still be all over the news that the front of the school was destroyed for no reason after the battle with Sunny that no one knows about. Let's assume you could somehow hide the fact that a magical apocalypse almost took place. It would be impossible to hide a gaping hole in the front of the school that would have taken months to fix.



This is not me overthinking things. These are huge flaws in the whole premise of the story that anyone would notice. Me as a kid would have noticed this. This story just plain does not make sense. It could never work.



No one knows that's not pony Twi, that's Evil Twi, who so far isn't all that evil, but she's the evil twin counterpart from the evil school, so I expect her to do something evil soon.



That has to be the first really good part of this movie, where everyone talks to Evil Twi mistaking her for pony Twi and then Pinkie figures out who she really is.



Evil Twi happens to have a device that steals magic. That's can't possibly go wrong.



That principal's a bitch.



Poor Brad. No one told him yet.



Did dragon Spike and dog Spike switch places? Nope, dog Spike just gained a new power.



Sunny tears Evil Twi a new one! Way to go. Just like Ken Watanabe says in Godzilla "The arrogance of men is thinking nature is in our control and not the other way around."



Evil Twi wants to "learn" things by wrecking them. Just like in the 1950s when the Van Allen belts were discovered and the US and USSR wanted to see what would happen if you nuked them. "Here's this thing and it protects life on Earth from the solar wind, so let's see if we can blow it up!" No one thought that was a bad idea at the time!



It's just like GMOs. "Let's take something that at best we have no idea what will happen and release it into the wild and feed it to 300 million people. What could go wrong?"



But it's worse than not knowing what will happen. Genetically modified soy has been shown to produce sterility and birth defects. This has been demonstrated with hamsters and pigs and yet trillions of dollars are backing forcing this crap down the throats of Americans. Europeans are smarter than that. There are a lot of horrible chemicals and GM "foods" that are illegal in Europe that are perfectly legal in America. WORSE, it's illegal to tell the public that food might contain GMOs! Every time someone tries to pass a law that says companies have to lable their food, you know, so people at least have a CHOICE, it gets shot down. Apparently "pro-choice" only means "pro-abortion". You don't have a choice when it comes to anything else.



And what happens if those GM crops were to mate with wild species? What are the potential effects for the entire biosphere if this stuff escapes our control? When there is a lack of biodiversity there is crop failure. A single parasite can wipe out an entire species and then millions of people will starve. If something goes wrong with these GM crops that are replacing all the other varieties then it won't just be one country that is affected. Food production is spread out over the world. The failure of a crop could kill a billion people. We need to think things through first.



Enough damage has been caused by just rushing into things without thinking them through first (that hasn't stopped people from rushing even faster today). When the stakes are as high they are there is no margin for error.



Sunny has remorse for bringing magic to Earth.



Bitch principal is evil. She wants Evil Twi to use the stolen magic for evil. And that's terrible.



No one thinks giving super powers to the girl who everyone has been a dick to the entire movie is a bad idea?



Repeat of battle with Sunny with role reversal. It lacks the impact of the original.



Pony Twi shows up at the end, makes a reference to the as yet unaired season five finale, and then spots Once Evil Now Good Twi.



What else can I say. It began slowly, didn't really introduce any of the new characters except Bitch Principal and Evil Twi, and then there was maybe a minute or two of a battle I've already seen. It's been done. There were some entertaining parts toward the end, but that was it. There was nothing new or groundbreaking. There were hints of possible directions the story could have gone, better directions, and then they were dropped. I understand the target audience is adults with deep pockets who have below 70 IQs and only care about "ZOMG FUN! Infinity/10! Saying 'it's a kid's show' excuses piss poor writing!", but even me as a little kid would have been underwhelmed by this third movie. Maybe it would have captured my attention for an afternoon, but the previous movies still have not left me. They deal with great archetypal struggles (especially the first one), whereas Friendship Games was just the same thing done worse to make money. This reminds me of when The Land Before Time started making a new movie every year, with more songs and less plot every time, and they just kept getting crappier, just to make money.



When you have 20 characters in a 70 minute movie there's no way even half of them can be fully fleshed out. Some of them only get a couple of lines. Who the hell are Sour Sweet, Sugarcoat, and the rest, but gimmick characters? They have no personalities. They are boring. Even Evil Twi and Bitch Principal come off as flat. The writers must have spent all of ten seconds thinking them up.



This is the kind of movie where there are 20 good minutes if you shut your brain off, but if you dare spend more than a couple minutes thinking about it it starts to suck, and the longer you think the more it sucks. Rainbow Rocks created an extended world for the characters to explore and it did a fantastic job with that. Friendship Games tried to do the same and ended up sucking. It wasn't terrible, not season five terrible, but it wasn't good either. It existed, it had good moments, it had more bad moments, it does not bode well for the upcoming fourth movie, but it is what it is, and I have to say I'm glad I saw it.



70/100

Russia in Syria

Russia is launching air strikes against the "Free Syrian Army", the "moderate rebels" who were created by the CIA, just like the CIA created ISIS. Russia is destroying all the heavy weapons and the high ranking officers so that the Iranians can pour in and slaughter ISIS unopposed.



In one day Russia has done more to protect humanity against evil than the US has since 2010. Vladimir Putin is the saviour of the free world, the greatest world leader of my lifetime. He is leading a coalition of free countries opposed to the New World Order.



The CIA created ISIS, warmongers in the US want to start a nuclear war with Russia. The biggest warmonger in history, who would win the Nobel War Prize if there ever was such an award, that complete monster, who was never a war hero, who has done everything in his power over the past 40 years to stonewall programs to help veterans, the worst enemy of US veterans ever, that evil son of a bitch John McCain who deserves to burn in Hell forever, wants the US to give surface to air missiles to shoot down Russian jets.

China Sends Aircraft Carrier to Syria

The balance of global power has shifted.



China has just docked its aircraft carrier Liaoning-CV-16 at the Syrian port of Tartus on Saturday. This marks the beginning of a triple alliance between China, Russia, and Iran joining forces to maintain the sovereignty of Syria by destroying the CIA backed ISIS that was put in place to get rid of Assad.



Projecting power globally is the sign of a superpower. Previously only the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom were capable of asserting themselves on the world stage. Now, as the UK and US are in decline, China has taken up the reigns. ISIS is so evil, so many have died, and the stability of the entire region, and by extension the world's oil, has come into jeopardy, prompting the world at large to intervene, just as they had when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.



The new triple alliance bypassed the US entirely. China acted without even letting Washington know what it was doing until after everything was accomplished. This is how the US becomes irrelevant globally. It almost happened in 2011 when Muammar Gaddaffi announced he would only trade oil for gold, not US Dollars. The US had to murder him to prevent the Dollar from collapsing. Now the US is up shit creek without a paddle. The only way to stop China and Russia is full scale nuclear war, and I pray President Zero is not that insane. This looks to be the beginning of a new world order.

The Mystery of Death

Kriyananda expounds upon Yogananda's teaching of death, suicide, and the three worlds: gross, subtle, and causal. He talks about how desires become karma that keep us trapped in a cycle of rebirth. Runs 21 minutes.

Liquid Water on Mars

NASA announced earlier today that liquid water was discovered on Mars. For decades there has been speculation that there was water some indeterminate time in the past and that it was all gone. People speculated that other factors were at play with what appeared to be (and in fact are) features that change seasonally (remember, Mars has seasons because of its tilted axis just like the Earth does). Well, now there's no hedging bets, there absolutely is liquid water on Mars.



Hydrated salts were discovered in the Hale crater in dark streaks that change with the seasons. In the Martian Summer the ice melts and forms salt water streams that refreeze in the Winter. The high salinity keeps the water liquid at temperatures well below its freezing point. The minerals in the water are mostly magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate, and sodium perchlorate.



Water, so far as we know, is a necessary condition for life, and even though that water contains strong oxidisers, who knows, there may be life on Mars. Those microscopic fossils might just be the tip of the iceberg.

Dalai Lama Health Concern

UPDATE

He is doing fine.



The Dalai Lama is being evaluated at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, USA. His tour for October has been canceled. They are not releasing any details at this moment.

The Power of the Guru

David Godman talks about the power of Ramana Maharshi to take away people's karma and confir upon them final realisation at the moment of death. A very moving talk. Runs 40 minutes.

Get Out and Play

I was outside on this day with absolutely perfect weather and got to thinking about kids playing outside. From there it was an easy step to adults playing outside, and why they don't.

Adults don't play, they *exercise*. It's not fun, it's torturous and hard and adults complain all the way through, they complain before, they complain after. If *exercise* is so damn horrible why don't adults stop exercising and start playing again? It could take the same amount of time, you'll still secretly be getting exercise, only you'll be having a lot more fun, and joy makes the body's secretion levels normal.

Why do adults *exercise*? It's to impress people they hate. Adults want to look better than the people they hate so they exercise. Anyone who thinks it's to impress potential mates is a fool. Look around and see, ugly people mate more than attractive people, because ugly people learn kindness and at the end of the day people would much rather be treated with kindness by an ugly person than treated with scorn by an attractive person. Attractive people will hate you no matter how good you look, so stop trying. They've had it easy, getting through life on their looks, they don't give a shit about treating people right. You're wasting your time trying to look good to impress people. In the end it doesn't matter if you have pecs on your abs or if your clothing size is somehow a negative number. You'll still get old, you'll still die. So what if you live an extra five years if they're spent in misery? I'm not saying don't take care of your body, don't turn it into a sewer, just remember when you were a kid and you played instead of *exercised* your body pretty much took care of itself.

From there my mind went to the disgusting trend of hairless humans. They look like hairless mice. It started just with women shaving their legs because of a propaganda campaign by the razor companies 100 years ago, and then it moved to men and women being totally hairless from the neck down. It's disgusting. Hairlessness has always been a sign of disease, however in the world did people come to be brainwashed to believe it's attractive? I'm pretty sure if humans were supposed to be hairless they would be.

The Worse Devils of Our Nature

2015 is a little more than half over and already wars have claimed 100,000 lives. In case you are wondering, that is more people than you will meet in your entire life. As I have been outlining every year since 2011 we are in a world gone mad. Tying into that thesis is a refutation of its antithesis, expressed in its most famous iteration in Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature, namely that this is the safest time in history.



To quote Samuel Johnson, I refute Pinker thus.



The 20th century was one long war, during which time more people died than at any time in history. And the wars have not ceased. There have been wars going on somewhere in the world during my entire life. 20,000 nuclear weapons sit on standby to wipe out humanity, up until the fall of the USSR there were stockpiles of enough biological weapons to kill 50 billion people. 200 million people have been killed by communism in the past century, another 500 million have been aborted, mostly in China.



On top of the out of control homicide of the past century there is the great danger of globalism in the spread of terrible diseases. The Spanish Flu in 1918 infected a quarter the population of the world, something that would have been impossible prior to the invention of trans-oceanic travel, killing 100 million people. The world has become so inter-connected that any disease can just hop a plane and be anywhere in a day. And with the insane level of sanitation and over reliance on antibiotics of modern society these diseases have once again become impossible to treat, just like the Black Death from six centuries ago. Germs never had it so easy.



The 20th century saw the unnatural deaths of 800 million people, making it, without question, the bloodiest century ever. If people died at this rate this at any other time in history humans would have gone extinct a long time ago.



This is absolutely not the safest time in history, it is by far the most dangerous.



And here's even more evidence. Look at all these wars, all over the world, with tens of thousands of deaths.



• Civil war in Ukraine has claimed nearly 2000 lives in these past 8 months

• The same for Libya

• 20,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan

• The war with ISIS has killed 10,000 people in Iraq and 30,000 in Syria







One inevitably wonders what ancient wars Steven Pinker hallucinated to reach his conclusion that the past was so much more dangerous than today? The only genocidal monsters from antiquity were Chingis Khan and Timur, and while the Islamic conquest of India and the Black Death were certainly horrific, humans were largely powerless to act on those catastrophes. Any modern army in the world could have prevented the genocide in Darfur or Rwanda, but instead chose to sit back and watch. Modern people are certainly no more moral than people from antiquity. In fact, the converse is probably true, that modern people are far less moral than at any time in history, choosing to do nothing while millions are raped and murdered around the world.



More people are dying today than have died before. There are more slaves today than at any time in the past. 85 people control half the world's wealth and use it to manipulate world events for their own benefit instead of wiping out disease, famine, and poverty for two billion people. People absolutely are less moral today than ever before, and the world is a far more dangerous place because of it. And if Steven Pinker thinks the opposite then he is deluding himself and is another part of the problem instead of the solution.

Oldest Quran Yet Discovered

Fragments from the Quran were discovered in Birmingham and have been dated to around the time of Muhammad's birth, or slightly before.

Keith Small, from the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, added: "This gives more ground to what have been peripheral views of the Koran's genesis, like that Muhammad and his early followers used a text that was already in existence and shaped it to fit their own political and theological agenda, rather than Muhammad receiving a revelation from heaven."



This is more evidence in support of the hypothesis that the text of the Quran comes from Syriac Christian sources in the Negev that were altered by Muhammad or someone else to justify the Arab conquest of the region. This is why the sites associated with early Islam are being destroyed by the Saudi government and others, not to prevent people from worshipping at Muhammad's birthplace, but to hide the fact that the religion of Islam was created after the political movement had established itself, to to distance it from its Christian and Jewish roots.

The Hidden History Of The Human Race

A 45 minute video composed of bits and pieces of interviews with Michael Cremo from the 1990s about how the scientistic magisterium deliberately lies about human antiquity. Includes information on Virginia Steen-McIntyre and the controversy in Hueyatlaco, Mexico.

Why Taken is the Most Satisfying Movie in History

Taken (2008) stars Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills, the ultimate badass. He is retired from some government job that he only refers to as being a "preventer". He's basically a clean James Bond combined with Maximus. This guy is an expert at slaughtering bad people. His daughter goes to Paris with her idiot friend who gets killed because she doesn't see the danger of inviting some random guy she met for three seconds at the airport over to have consequence free sex. The daughter gets captured by Albanians who run a sex trafficking operation (It is easier for them to work in Paris than in Albania for some reason the movie does explicitly mention, but I forget what it is). Bryan (Liam Neeson) then gets the bad guy on the phone and delivers the greatest whole paragraph ever:



"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you. "



The villain, who is also an idiot, snarkly says "good luck" and hangs up.



Bryan knows this weaselly little guy who works behind a desk under another guy we never see who works behind a bigger desk who is somebody within the French government. He gets Bryan to Paris because he only has a couple days to rescue his daughter. When he gets there he kills a few really bad people and destroys a trailer and the desk jockey tells him to leave. Bryan instead tricks him and disappears.



He steals the ID of a French inspector and breaks into the hideout of the Albanians, who are idiots and do not question why a French inspector is speaking English with an Irish accent. There he meets the guy on the phone and says "I told you I would find you." He then kills everyone in the hideout except the telephone guy, who he brings to this rundown building. There he slams two railroad spikes into the guy's thighs and hooks him up to electrical wires. And asks where his daughter is. The guy does not answer so Bryan electrocutes him. He asks again and the guy again refuses to answer, because, as I've already said twice, this is one stupid criminal. Bryan electrocutes him again and then he gets fed up. He tells the thug "You either give me what I need or this switch will stay on until they turn the power off for lack of payment on the bill." The guy answers. He tells him that he sold his daughter to a man named Saint-Clair. Bryan knows he is telling the truth. He says "I believe you. But that won't save you," and then he turns the power on and leaves the room, letting the guy fry, and it's like a full body orgasm. There is human garbage in the world who really do this kind of thing and they deserve not only to die but to suffer, and this movie satisfies that need in me, but I'll say more about that later.



Bryan goes back to the desk jockey who stonewalls him until he shoots his wife (she lives) and then the desk jockey does what is right instead of what is legal and reveals where Saint-Clair lives.



Saint-Clair turns out to be an American who sells young women in this Eyes Wide Shut place. His goons catch Bryan during a party and Bryan kills them all, noisily. Saint-Clair asks a waiter or someone to check out what all the noise is and the second he opens the door he gets shot in the face and dies. Bryan then shoots Saint-Clair in an elevator and demands to know where his daughter is. Saint-Clair tells him she is on the boat of this billionaire sheik that is leaving in a few minutes. Lying in a pool of blood he pleads with Bryan, saying "Please understand... it was all business. It wasn't personal." To which Bryan replies "It was all personal to me," and then empties the gun into this fucker's face.



Bryan speeds along the riverside in a stolen car and then jumps off a bridge onto the boat. He kills a bunch of people on the boat and then breaks into the room of the sheik. The sheik has his daughter. He's got a knife to her throat. The sheik thinks he's going to get out of this, he thinks he's seen enough movies to know how this works. He thinks this is the real world. He is mistaken. He tries to tell Bryan "We can negoti-" and gets shot in the face mid-sentence in the best scene ever ever. This scene is like fifty times better than when that son of a bitch got electrocuted. If real life were a movie now would be the time to smoke, but life is not a movie and smoking is a filthy habit, so I just have to come down naturally.



If you have not figured it out yet, this is the best movie ever, and the reason is very simple: this movie is the exact opposite of real life. This is the way life should be. In the real world bad people get away with doing bad things all the time. The law protects bad people, who have "rights", whereas good people get beaten in the face with a telescoping baton. Little kids get tickets for running an illegal lemonade stand while Saudi princes can run prostitution rings in the US for decades and nothing happens to them. People can get arrested for collecting rain water because the government wants you to pay the legal water monopoly for something that should be free while windmill companies can kill tens of thousands of endangered birds every year. Someone who smokes a joint gets beaten in the face and thrown in jail for 20 years while child rapists get out in only 5. That's how real life works.



Movies don't have to be like real life. In a movie good wins over evil, right wins over wrong. In a movie the ultimate badass can say "fuck their rights" and kill villains who deserve to die. A movie hero can say "fuck corrupt laws that protect bad people" and do what is right instead of what is legal and can save the innocent and kill complete monsters. And the hero of Taken does this while rubbing it in the face of the authority figure. He berates the desk jockey for caring about what is legal instead of what is right, and he is totally vindicated in the end and triumphs over evil. In movies the heroes have power and skills and weapons and the villains are weak and stupid. No movie exemplifies this more than Taken, and that is why it is the greatest movie ever. It satisfies the deep abiding need of knowing that right will win against wrong and seeing bad people suffer and good people get rewarded. Taken satisfies the need for the world to make sense and for order and justice to prevail. It is medicine for the soul.

Reminisces of Flying Saucers

I saw a blimp yesterday and it got me thinking of an event from a long time ago. In maybe 1994 I saw something fly over my house. It looked like a Sears-Haack body, a tube that tapers at both ends. It had no visible wings or tail and was completely silent. It flew overhead in maybe one second, if that. It was this event that led me to believe in the existence of flying saucers.

Many years later, writing for The Urban Mystic, I did some crude calculations and estimated that the object was moving at about 204 miles per hour. Either that or it must have been flying at a much higher altitude and have been monstrously huge. It is not the fastest thing in the world (about as fast as a top line airplane in the late First World War), but it doesn't need to be. It could have been performing reconnaissance or something. The important thing to note is that it is truly unidentified. Lacking wings or a tail there is no way it could have been an airplane, and it could not have been a blimp because it was totally silent, something the blimp that flew overhead yesterday (and every other airship I have seen) was most definitely not.

Now, absent tangible evidence such as a photograph or signed affidavit from the flight crew (in alienese possibly), there is always the possibility that I hallucinated the whole thing. Taking that into account I will say with 99.5% accuracy that I am convinced what I saw as a real object. What was it? Was it a flying saucer or some sort of human aircraft? There's no way to know. It is a true unknown flying object. What matters most is how the event inspired me to investigate further into the phenomena. The evidence for alien visitation of Earth is overwhelming, and I would have never known had it not been for this chance encounter 20 years ago.

Official 9/11 "Truth" Position

Look, I'll say it again, if you want to believe some element of the US government knew the 9/11 attacks were going to happen and did nothing to stop them deliberately to start a war, fine. If you want to believe some element of the US government staged 9/11 using CIA operatives, fine. Those are both very possible and I wouldn't be surprised if either turned out to be true.

If you believe that no planes hit the buildings, that it was space lasers, or microwave weapons, that holograms of planes covered up missiles and the planes were flown to a secret location and all the passengers were shot to cover it up, or a make believe substance called "nano thermite" was used in a controlled demolition using the phrase "pull them" which is not a demolition term, and somehow hundreds of thousands of tons of the stuff was secreted into the buildings with no one noticing it, or anything else besides planes hitting the buildings as the sole cause, you're a fucking retard. Physics works, planes took down the buildings, fuck you.

William Buhlman on OBEs as Spiritual Practice

William Buhlman, an out-of-body experience specialist at the Monroe Institute, gives an hour long talk followed by 20 minutes of questions and answers. He talks about the importance of preparing for death and what comes after, something this society totally ignores to its detriment. That's the one thing the jihadis get right, eternity is more important than the temporal.



The best part was a question at 1h13m.



"Do you believe we are entering a more spiritual age?"



"No.... Without getting into it too deeply, definitely not."



Brilliant answer. I agree completely. People seem to me to be more materialistic now than ever before. Everyone drinks their thousand calorie Starfucks milkshake cup of chino drinks and they wonder why they get fat, they play video games on their Texas phones, buy their $300 Nike shoes that are made for half a penny in a sweatshop in Vietnam, mow their lawns fifty times a week, throw away more food in a day than all of Africa eats in a month, and complain about their triggurz. I hate you all. Fuck love, you people disgust me. You don't deserve love. That's something else the jihadis get right, the West is absolutely full of human garbage that is polluting the world. Jihadis are also polluting the world with their ideology of rape and murder and worship of a pedophile rapist murderer, but that's probably why they can spot human garbage with such ease, they're the worst of the worst. The West at least has some good people mixed in with the assholes, jihadism is entirely filled with assholes. The West can still be fixed, jihadis can only be bombed.



A couple of minor objections:



He does go into the whole "we need to experience things to learn about them" that I previously said sounds like nonsense. He admits this is his opinion.



In the beginning he talks about brainwashing as children and how if we were in Iran or China our belief systems would have been different. That may be, and probably is, true for most people, but it certainly was not true for me. I never bought into the game. I always thought "if adults say something is true or the way things are supposed to be, don't believe them." Adults lie to maintain the power structure because that is their only source of legitimacy. Certainly not using reason, only using force.

Suffering and The Meaning of Life

Fitting in with what I've written two weeks ago about reincarnation, I'll talk here about the meaning of life.



Michael Prescott has some speculations about why there is suffering in the world where an intelligent but not omniscient God created the world to gain life experience. Here's what I left as a comment.



I don't like the idea of God creating the universe to experience things. That seems like a cosmic version of the TV show Jackass. "Wouldn't it be cool to see what it would be like to get burned alive in a car crash? Maybe I could get out before getting killed? Wouldn't that be fun to see if I could?" It's a bit of an oversimplification, but it seems to reduce God or Spirit or even individual souls to adrenaline junkies, or at the very least people who are extremely bored with too much free time. Seeking experience for the sake of experience seems so very underwhelming to me. In its absolute worst form, as seen in some versions of "new age" literature, souls plan their lives beforehand in minute details, so you end up with a scenario where souls are basically masochists. A group of souls floating around planning their next life together when one soul says to the others "I'll be the child and you'll be my parents. At age five, no four and a half, I'll get cancer and die and break your hearts. Then, fifty years of misery later, you'll die and we'll meet up back here and I'll point and laugh and say 'fooled ya!' Then, the next go around I'll be the parent and you two can be the children who die. It will be rousing great fun!"

There are two explanations for this world of suffering that I see merit to. They both say primarily that our purpose here is to escape the world and only really differ in explaining how we got stuck here in the first place, to a degree.

In the perennial traditions and in A Course in Miracles, we individual souls exist because God needed someone to love. It's not loneliness in the everyday sense, because God lacks nothing. This is a higher level need based on over-abundance. God is so overflowing with love that it wanted someone to share it with. The world itself is seen as illusory, but even if it's not there need be no problem with suffering at all.

"Natural suffering" like volcanoes and asteroids and having to kill other creatures to survive is an easy one. The world is pretty close to as optimal as one can get. The photoreceptors in the eye can detect single photons, so they can't get any better, for example. There are trade-offs to everything because of the physical constraints of the world (which need to be unimaginably precise to permit the universe and life to exist). Humans have easily injured backs and knees, and narrow hips make childbirth painful, but those are offset by the greater benefits that are gotten through walking upright. So natural suffering can be explained through utilitarianism. Certain unpleasant situations must exist to permit much greater benefits.

The much bigger problem is human caused suffering, like rape and murder and war. That is traditionally explained through the free will defense. God wants us to share in the divine love voluntarily. Forcing us to love would be a form of metaphysical rape.

Even if the world is to an extent "real", more good is wrought through the way the world is than the bad caused by the suffering. We can share in love in more ways, even if we choose not to. Suffering then is no longer God's problem, it is a problem of our own refusal to be moral and treat one another as we should.

Of course, if the world is illusory, then we are tricking ourselves into thinking this suffering exists and our goal is to realize this and get out and back to the perfection into which we were created.

A Course in Miracles explains this wonderfully. God did not create the world, we did, and suffering exists because of our fear and guilt. Unsatisfied with the equal love God was giving to all of us in perfection, we (who find ourselves in this universe) demanded special love. We wanted to be loved more. When God refused to give in to our egoistic demands we then imagined this world up where we could be special. The dream of suffering and death "prove" we are more powerful than the God who refused us the special status we "deserve". Knowing we can't really hurt ourselves, God permits us to sulk in the corner until we get over our upset. At the same time God descended into the dream to remind us that we are dreaming and can wake up at any time when we are ready to return to the perfection into which we were created.

It makes sense because real people do this all the time. There is nothing new that we can't test about what may or may not be the motivations of spirits who want to experience horrible things just to see what it's like. The psychology of the Course is real world human psychology and can be seen in child development all over the world. Children sulk. Adults sulk. We project our emotions and delusions onto the world. We punish ourselves unnecessarily out of misplaced guilt. It makes sense to suppose that if we do this on Earth than we would do the same on a grander scale in some higher dimension. There's nothing in it that resembles speculation about what stunts Superman would pull to see if he could jump off the Empire State Building or whatever.

Suffering acts also as a motivation to escape the world. It acts as a motivation to do good to others so that we can grow in wisdom and compassion. So we move up the evolutionary ladder from plants to animals on to humans, and while the capacity for suffering increases so too do the benefits increase at a much faster rate. So a plant suffers less than a cow but it gets less out of life than the cow, and the cow suffers less than a human but it gets less out of life than the human. And this continues until we realize that the world is illusory and then we can either leave it forever or we can take the path of the bodhisattva and deliberately return to the world and choose to suffer more to alleviate the suffering of others. We can grow into perfect expressions of morality rather than just being bored and bouncing around the universe to see what it's like.

And as I've written over a thousand words by now I'll end here.

Biblical Archaeology

The central dogma of biblical archaeology is based on a faulty chronology. Some scholars invented a chronology when events of the Bible should have taken place, and when they find the evidence of events that were described in the Bible they find those events happened a few centuries earlier than when the chronology says they should have. Instead of doing what any rational being would do, which is to revise the chronology, the biblical archaeologists become even more entrenched in the chronology. They proclaim the Bible to be myth and the artefacts that were discovered to belong to a new, previously unknown period in history. This is the exact opposite of how science works. If the data do not fit the hypothesis it is the hypothesis that must be revised to fit the data. Instead, biblical archaeologists revise the data to fit the hypothesis.



Runs 5 minutes

A Tale of Two Rebirths

There are two main versions of the mechanics of reincarnation that I will call "old" and "new" for sake of simplicity.

The old system has been around for thousands of years. While the details differ slightly, it is the system of reincarnation taught primarily by Hindus and Buddhists, but also by some ancient Christian sects and in Judaism until about the fifteenth century. A good outline is provided in an essay by Ken Wilber called "Death, Rebirth, and Meditation". There exists some disagreement as to what survives and how long the whole process takes, but in general rebirth takes between 49 days and 200 years; some say personality and memories do not transmigrate and others do. All the differences are really pretty minor when viewed against the similarities regarding how the mechanism itself works. Human psychology is basically the same as what modern science has shown us. Our fears and addictions carry on with us where we have to deal with them in very real terms. Psychological traumas we suffer in this life must be dealt with in this life or the next, and if we cannot overcome our problems than we will be carried aloft by them into a new rebirth. Some say we meet up with people we've known in this life (or even other past lives) in the between life stage, and that certain souls transmigrate together, and others say we do this all alone, but every action in this life always has an equal reaction in the next. There is no escaping causality, the books must be balanced, full stop. We work through our troubles, gradually perfecting ourselves lifetime after lifetime until we finally break free from suffering all together and abide as Spirit forever.

In the new system, promulgated by certain spiritualist circles and "new age" movements, the whole old system is turned on its head. Rather than beginning in ignorance and spending lifetimes trying to end suffering, in the new system we all begin enlightened and we come to this life to experience suffering. Every soul is enlightened, we come to this world with a sort of willful amnesia, and when we die we are automatically restored to perfect knowledge. The lives we live are games we play with one another, and they don't really mean anything on the other side. When we die there is no balancing of good and bad deeds, because there is no good or bad, as we plan our lives out in minute details from the beginning. People who get raped or murdered make agreements with other souls who will be doing the raping and murdering, so there are no villains and victims, and not because the world is ultimately illusory, but because the world is a game we play for life experience. In the new system souls are basically masochists. You can't really know what something is like until you experience it first hand, so a soul living in perfection might have an idea what suffering is, but it doesn't really know until it experiences it for itself.

Why anyone would want to partake of such experiences I cannot understand. If I were Superman and I knew with absolute certainty I could never get hurt I still wouldn't care to know what it felt like to drive a car into a tree or get shot in the face. I wouldn't care to know what it was like to drown or get exploded. I wouldn't care to know what it was like to live in poverty on the streets, or for that matter what it would be like to live in a mansion eating lobster every day.

The new system is very distasteful and reeks of wish fulfillment. Imagine a group of souls floating around planning their next life together. One soul says to the others "I'll be the child and you'll be my parents. At age five, no four and a half, I'll get cancer and die and break your hearts. Then, fifty years of misery later, you'll die and we'll meet up back here and I'll point and laugh and say 'fooled ya!' Then, the next go around I'll be the parent and you two can be the children who die. It will be rousing great fun!" The idea infuriates me, to be honest. I think that's much worse than the materialist idea that when you're dead you're dead and there's no justice. I would much rather live in a universe where life is ultimately meaningless and there is no afterlife than have a universe where the Nazis made an agreement with the millions of people murdered in the Holocaust that the whole thing would be staged just to see what it would be like to gas eleven million people. Admittedly the grotesquery of such a scenario is not evidence that it is not true in itself, but it does not help the case either.

It is also not helped by the types of evidence that are available to support either system. The old system, which recapitulates everything we know from earthly psychology, is attested to through near death experiences that reveal our mental state and personalities are pretty much the same after death as before, and through spontaneously remembered past lives of children that often turn out to be phenomenally accurate when later investigated. Enlightened sages also attest to the veracity of the old system through the remembrance of their past lives.

The primary evidence for the new system is through hypnosis of adults, that sometimes does produce highly accurate results (which could be more akin to a form of remote viewing), but a lot of times these memories are false, crafted by the imagination of the subject and the leading of the hypnotist. The new system is also, sometimes, attested to by channeled material, but by no means all. Some channeled material flatly denies the existence of reincarnation, other spirits admit they don't know, and some affirm the old system. The spirits that talk about group souls, of instant enlightenment following death, of coming to Earth to experience things no sane person would ever want to experience such as disease, disasters, and war, and flat out deny the existence of good and evil, seem to me to be lower spirits. Whether malicious or simply tricksters (like Internet trolls of the spirit world), they will say whatever gets them the most attention, and earthly interlocutors receiving confirmation of their desires pass it along in books that say you can literally create your reality and that morality is for squares. As John admonishes in his first epistle, we are to test the spirits to see if they are of God. Anyone from the other side can say they are advanced spirits with brilliant insight into the workings of the universe, and that is why we must use our reason and intelligence to see if what they say makes sense.

In the light of the evidence and the moral implications I would have to say that if reincarnation does exist it seems far more likely that the old system with a gradual progression from ignorance to perfection is correct.