Blood Miracle Forecasts Bad Omen

Cardinal Crescenzio Sepeial holding the vial containing Saint Januarius' blood. 

Photo Credit:
Paola Magni



The vial containing the blood of Saint Januarius failed to liquefy. Just who is Saint Januarius, and why is this issue with his blood important? Here's the story, from Michael Talbot's Holographic Universe (p. 119-120):



"Every year in September and May a huge crowd gathers at the Duomo San Gennaro, the principal cathedral of Naples, to witness a miracle. The miracle involves a small vial containing a brown crusty substance alleged to be the blood of San Gennaro, or St. Januarius, who was beheaded by the Roman emperor Diocletian in A.D. 305. According to legend, after the saint was martyred a serving woman collected some of his blood as a relic. No one knows precisely what happened after that, save that the blood didn't turn up again until the end of the thirteenth century when it was ensconced in a silver reliquary in the cathedral.



"The miracle is that twice yearly, when the crowd shouts at the vial, the brown crusty substance changes into a bubbling, bright red liquid. There is little doubt that the liquid is real blood. in 1902 a group of scientists from the University of Naples made a spectroscopic analysis of the liquid by passing a beam of light through it, verifying that it was blood. Unfortunately, because the reliquary containing the blood is so old and fragile, the church will not allow it to be cracked open so that other tests can be done, and so the phenomenon has never been thoroughly studied.



"But there is further evidence that the transformation is a more than ordinary event. Occasionally throughout history (the first written account of the public performance of the miracle dates back to 1389) when the vial is brought out, the blood refuses to liquefy. Although rare, this is considered a very bad omen by the citizens of Naples. In the past, the failure of the miracle has directly preceded the eruption of Vesuvius and the Napoleonic invasion of Naples. More recently, in 1976 and 1978, it presaged the worst earthquake in Italian history and the election of a communist city government in Naples, respectively.



"Is the liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood a miracle? It appears to be, at least in the sense that it seems impossible to explain by known scientific laws." [emphasis added]



Skep-dicks have claimed the substance in the vial is a thixotropic gel containing iron oxide. Of course, they've produced bullshit stunts where they've created a similar substance that liquefies when shaken, but that's not proof of anything. A ventriloquist can reproduce the effect of voices coming out of a radio but that doesn't mean that radios are fake. Just because an effect can be reproduced through other means doesn't in any way indicate that those are the only means of producing the effect. There are many ways to produce powered flight, and there are many different types of light bulb, and all sorts of other phenomena can be produced in different ways. Magicians reproducing psychic phenomena does not in the least prove, or even provide evidence that psychic phenomena are fake. It's a confidence trick designed to subvert the rational mind.



From Live Science:



"The blood did not liquefy in 1939, when World War II broke out, nor in
1943, the year the Nazi occupied Italy, nor in 1973, remembered for a
bout of cholera in Naples. Most recently, it failed to liquefy in 1980,
when a devastating earthquake struck Irpinia, some 30 miles east of
Naples, leaving more than 2,400 people dead.



"According to the website storiacity.it,
over the centuries the failed miracle coincided with 22 epidemics, 11
revolutions, three droughts, 14 archbishops death (within a 30-day
period), nine dead popes (over a period of a few weeks), four wars, 19
earthquakes, and three religious persecutions."



The blood failed to liquefy again on the 16th of December this year. Every time the blood has failed to liquefy there has been some disaster.



That could mean one of two things:



1. The liquefaction of the blood is a genuine miracle and failure to liquefy really does portend bad omens.



2a. The liquefaction of the blood is a psychic phenomena involving the collective consciousness of the people of Naples to see into the future and predict when calamities are about to occur.



2b. The blood is fake but unconscious precognition is still involved. Either the priests and other church officials psychically sense the future and purposefully do some trick to keep the fake substance a solid to warn the public, or the collective consciousness of the people of Naples keeps the fake substance a solid because of unconscious precognition.



The skep-dicks have no legs to stand on. The failure of the substance to liquefy has always coincided with disasters. It doesn't matter what is in the vial, blood or iron oxide gel, either a miracle or psychic powers are involved, because no matter what's in the vial, the substance itself or the people around it are still able to predict the future, something materialism says is impossible.



What does that mean for 2017? Let me just say that if I had any travel plans for Naples I would cancel them.

What is at Stake in the Next Election

There are three primary issues that I care about that influence my decision on the next election. All the little things, the degeneracy, the lies, the demographic decline and fall of the West, that's all secondary. All that can be dealt with much later. That's been my position for many years. For other people, they want to deal with minutia right now and ignore major problems. They want to deal with the hangnail RIGHT NOW and focus on the massive hemorrhaging wound at their own convenience, if ever. Look at all the issues that have captured the attention of the masses over the past five years. They're all trivial. Look at the three biggest catastrophes facing the country: the economy, national security, and the worst education system in the developed world; the masses ignore them completely.



As long as Caesar gave the plebs bread and circuses the masses were happy. The same is true today but with welfare and celebrities exposing themselves on television.



Haven't I been saying it? We have the worst unemployment in US history, terror attacks - whether organised or "lone wolf" - are at a terrifying level, we're hemorrhaging $4 billion per day - over $1 trillion per year - more than we have, there's more debt than money in the entire US economy, the criminal government is decapitating duly elected governments in the Muslim world and replacing them with radical barbarians from the 7th century who burn women alive in cages, throw gays off buildings, and post the videos of their rape and murder online, Iran is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, diseases that had once been eradicated like TB and measles have been reintroduced due to the gigantic flood of illegal migration, and the masses are concerned over trivial issues that concern maybe 2 million people, tops. Let's focus on the 93 million people without jobs first, then get to the 2 million people who want to use the wrong bathroom. I'm not saying let's ignore the trivially small issue, I'm saying let's focus on fixing the catastrophe first, then when we're not on the verge of total collapse, then we can deal with the trivial issue.



Issue one is the economy, stupid. Always has been, always will be, until we evolve into a post-economic system where people no longer have to pay to exist.



In 1930 there were 93 million people alive in the US, and 13 million people without jobs. In 2016 there are 350 million people alive in the US (324 million "officially" and at least 40 million here illegally, most uncounted), and 93 million people without jobs. There are more people who are not working in the US today than were alive during the Great Depression. It's that bad.



Don't let the fake "unemployment" numbers fool you, or the "120,000 jobs created last month." That's sophistry. More flashy nonsense designed to distract you from the truth. Those "jobs" that are created are temporary minimum wage jobs that only let you work 20 hours a week. Even if you had three jobs you wouldn't be able to live. And the unemployment numbers are even more deceptive. Once a person's benefits expire they are no longer counted as "unemployed" even if they haven't found a job yet. Those people exist in a state of limbo, where they're not employed but they're not "unemployed", so they are completely forgotten by everyone but the people whose lives are ruined by this disastrous system of lies. Sure, "unemployment" might be 4%, or however low they pretend it to be (4% has always been the margin of error and is, effectively, 0 unemployment), but in terms of real numbers it's over 25%. One in four working age Americans is not making enough money to survive.



I'm no "expert" but it doesn't take a genius to see the economic policies the criminal US government has been pursuing since at least 2007 are not working. In fact, they are making the situation worse year after year. Every year fewer people are working, those who are are having their hours cut, jobs are being shipped overseas, and more immigrants are flooding into the country, diluting an already ruinously low job market.



Printing money, inflating the stock market, and erasing jobs is not the way to fix the economy, it's a way to permanently destroy it.



What's the solution? We need to stop printing money and we need to bring jobs back. Take a good look at the candidates. Only one of them is not a career politician. Only one of them has even held a job, let alone created jobs. Scoffers will say that a handful of Donald Trump's businesses filed for bankruptcy, and they say this is a sign he knows nothing about business. They say this because they know absolutely nothing about business. Most businesses fail within the first ten years, and most very successful people have failed a great deal before finally succeeding. Yes, a handful of Donald Trump's businesses have failed, that's because he is a very successful business mogul who has taken a lot of risks starting a lot of businesses and failing at several of them to discover what works and what doesn't. Even great athletes fail most of the time. With great success no one remembers the failures. No one remembers the 67% of balls you missed, they only focus on the 33% you hit out of the park. But with Donald Trump the scoffers like to point out his handful of failures and say those totally negate his successes! You can make a compilation of all the shots Michael Jordan missed and think you're making him look like an idiot, but most people will recognise that you're the idiot and that Jordan was one of the greatest basketball players of all time.



Donald Trump has an estimated 500 businesses. 4 of them have gone bankrupt. That's a success rate of  99.2%! And never-Trumpers still parade those four bankruptcies around as if Trump is the worst businessman on the planet!



Scoffers also like to say he started out with tons of money he inherited and that proves he knows nothing about business. They say this because they know absolutely nothing about money. Nearly all lottery winners end up flat broke within a few years of winning. They end up worse off financially than before they won. Inheriting money does not make someone a tremendous success, it usually makes you a loser and a failure. If someone gave you $1,000 and you went and turned it into $1,000,000, then you would be very good at making money. Donald Trump turned a few million into $10 billion. He created a global business that employs tens of thousands of people, and has become one of the most famous billionaires in the world. Sure, people like Carlos Slim and Warren Buffett might be richer, but they're not celebrity billionaires. Very few billionaires are as famous as Donald Trump. He knows more about branding than most of the other billionaires combined.



Who knows more about jobs, Hitlery Roddamn Clinton – career politician, or Donald Trump – business mogul? If you had to take a gamble, would you gamble on someone who can string a bunch of pretty theoretical words together or someone who has actually created jobs? Trump has negotiated with governments all over the world, he knows what he's doing. On the other hand, Clinton's brand of negotiations led to the destabilisation of North Africa and the Near East with the Arab Spring, war in Libya, war in Syria, war in Iraq, the spread of ISIS, war in Ukraine. Donald Trump might have failed selling steaks, but Hitlery Clinton has failed completely at geopolitics, and a million lives have already been lost as a result.



No one can say whether Trump's economic plan will work. Economists said the subprime market was solvent months before it collapsed, so it's safe to say most of economics is guess work. The one thing we do know is that the Bush-Obama-Clinton economic policies have failed, and will continue to fail. A vote for Clinton is a vote for a proven track record of failure. A vote for Trump gives us at least the chance of success.



Safe Bet: Trump



Issue number two is national security. This one should be a no brainer. Ignoring the existence of Islamic terrorism has only made it worse. Every month, just about, we hear of another mass shooting somewhere. Just as one crisis ends another one flairs up with no time in between to recover.



Millions of radical Muslim "refugees" have flooded Europe, and the EU has allowed it because the white Europeans have given up on breeding and they need to import a working class to prop up the bloated welfare system. Sure, rape and murder might have skyrocketed, and thousands of years of European culture might have to be abandoned because it's haram, but that's a small price to pay to replace the European babies who were never born.



The same thing is happening in the US on a smaller scale. ISIS brags online that they are infiltrating the West with operatives who are posing as refugees. Last year FBI Director James Comey said that ISIS has cells in all 50 US states. What is anyone doing to stop them? Attempting to confiscate the guns of legal gun owners? How well did that work out in France? In France guns are close to illegal. Semi-automatic guns, the kind where you have to pull the trigger every time to make it fire, are limited to 3 round capacity. And yet all the gun restrictions in the world didn't stop ISIS terrorists from acquiring bombs and military grade guns and murdering 130 people in Paris last year. It's almost as if criminals don't obey the law!



And as all of this is happening the criminal US government won't even use the words "Islamic" and "terrorist" in the same sentence! Or else they'll try to deflect the issue and say that 99% of Muslims are good, and it's just a handful who are terrorists. Well, 1% of a million people is still ten thousand people! These people have no problem letting in thousands of would-be terrorists, all so that they don't look racialist, even though Islam is not a race, it is a set of beliefs held by people of all races on every continent.



And it's not just the radicals. What counts as "moderate" is abhorrent as well. The governments of eleven Muslim countries make homosexuality a crime punishable by death. You can't say all those countries are full of radicals. The Saudis, the Emirates, Kuwait, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran, are they all radicals? The Saudi princes are the biggest supporters of Hitlery Clinton on the planet. They live in all the comfort the Western world has to offer and drink Johnny Walker Black when no one is looking. They seem pretty moderate to me. I mean, they're not running around blowing themselves up or cutting off heads.... Actually the Saudi government beheads more people per year than ISIS does. And they're the moderates.



Clinton has taken $25 million from Saudi Arabia, a country where women are not allowed to vote, or drive, or leave the home without male supervision. A country where marital rape is legal, where child marriage is legal, where child rape is legal. A country that is funding ISIS. That's right, the same country that is funding the enemies of the US are funding Clinton as well! If any other person on the planet was connected to these people that person would not be allowed to run for president. But Clinton is above the law. She's too big to jail.



If you're a woman, or gay, or a Jew, or an atheist and you vote for Hitlery Clinton you are literally a traitor to yourself and your own best interests. Clinton is backed by the Saudi government, which murders gays, treats women as property, and imprisons anyone who is not a Sunni Muslim.



And Trump doesn't want to exclude Muslims from America. In one of the
debates he said that the Muslim community in America needs to work with
the police to find the few radicals who want to launch terror attacks.
The only way to eliminate the radicals is if people within the Muslim
community help the police identify who the radicals are. Working
together is not exclusion.



Trump's "extreme vetting" of persons
from regions that are known to harbor terrorists (Syria, Iran, Lybia),
isn't excluding Muslims either. Most Muslims will get through because
they're not terrorists. Even Clinton herself said we need "vetting that
is as tough as it needs to be." Checking someone's papers who want to
enter the United States is not an exclusion of Muslims from America any
more than Carter's suspension of visas from Iran in 1979 following the
Islamic Revolution, and his deportation of 15,000 Iranians who were
found in violation of their visas (which was upheld on First Amendment
ground in federal court).



Don't think I'm trying to lay all the blame at the feet of Islamic terrorism. There are other terrorist groups a lot closer to home. Elements within the CIA staged a coup in Ukraine a few years ago as a pretext for going to war with Russia. NATO has been expanding in Russia's near abroad for decades, and their actions have ramped up in recent years. Remember, Russia has 7,000 nuclear weapons. Total war necessarily means nuclear war, which means billions of deaths worldwide. Hitlery Clinton and all the Republicans have come out and said they want nuclear world war with Russia. Donald Trump is the only candidate who has said the only logical statement regarding Russia, that they are our natural ally against Islamic terror in the world. Russia and the Assad regime in Syria represent stabilising influences in the region. So did Gadaffi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Stable, secular military dictatorships all throughout the Islamic world have been eliminated one by one by the US, leading to the spread of radical Islamic groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, the breakdown of governance and the rule of law, and millions of deaths. Remember, this started with the first Clinton when he invaded Somalia for no apparent reason, and continued under Bush who destroyed Iraq at the cost of $1 trillion and thousands of American lives, and has escalated under Obama and Hitlery with their Arab Spring policy. Both parties are guilty of destroying stable governments and strengthening Islamic terrorism. Both parties have the blood of millions of innocents on their hands. Both parties want to start a war with Russia. Only Donald Trump wants to avoid war. He wants to work with Russia to defeat ISIS – who the US created, either deliberately or out of criminal negligence – and then he wants to pull out and focus on America.



Clinton is so worried about the 250,000 people in Aleppo, because only
the US is allowed to murder hundreds of thousands of civilians, no one
else. It doesn't matter that up to 1 million Iraqis, mostly civilians,
died in the war that she voted for. It doesn't matter that she wants
regime change in Syria because the elite who fund her want to build an
oil pipeline through the country, it doesn't matter that millions more
will die if Assad is eliminated, and that billions will die in nuclear
war. Clinton has to stare down Putin because he's the only one on the
planet who is resisting US aggression.



Clinton gave Russia the
uranium to build nuclear missiles capable of wiping out the United
States. 20% of US uranium was sold to Russia in a pay-to-play scheme in
exchange for Clinton Foundation "donations".



On live TV she
revealed that our response time is 4 minutes, letting them know how far
from the coast they need to park their subs to wipe us out before we
even notice the launch. 4 minutes by ballistic missile is about the
distance from the coast to Bermuda. If Russian subs are closer to the
coast than that, they can launch their missiles and destroy our cities
BEFORE our defense installations can even detect the launch. Clinton
gave the Russians knowledge on how to conduct a decapitation strike
against the US, a first strike that eliminates our ability to launch a
retaliation.



Clinton calls Putin "Hitler" and threatens to start a
war when she gets in the White House. Clinton wants to start a war with
Russia after giving them our uranium and letting them know what our
nuclear response time is. It's almost as if she wants Russia to
annihilate the US.



And securing the border? Trump wants to secure the border so we keep crime and drugs from spilling over into the United States (and by cutting the bottom out of the market, starving the drug cartels and helping Mexico out too).



Some people crossing the border are trafficking drugs. "Most of the drugs that enter the U.S. come from Central and South America."



Some people crossing the border are criminals. In a 2005 report 27% of inmates in Federal prisons were in the country illegally. Yes, that's fewer people than the native population, I don't think anyone denies that, but 49,000 people is still a lot. It would be nice if we could monitor who it is crossing the border, especially with instances of human trafficking and human rights abuse. It would be nice to cut that down, and whether that's with the Great Wall of China, a chain-link fence, or more border patrol agents, stopping human beings, including sex slaves, being smuggled over the border, even if it's only a few thousand, is a good idea.



Drug cartels are using rape as a weapon on the border. From Latina.com:



"From beheading to kidnappings, there seems to be no limit to what the Mexican drug cartels are willing to do to assert their dominance—and they deal not only in drugs, but also in humans. The majority of the coyotes who help undocumented immigrants cross the border are affiliated with the cartels.



Although many politicians would like to believe that the violence will stay to the south of the border, the reality is that it has already begun to affect South Western states. The revelation that Phoenix is now the “kidnapping capital” of the United States only affirms what many residents already believe.



Now, a new method of marking territory has crossed over into the United States. “Rape trees” are popping up in Southern Arizona and their significance is horrific. These “rape trees” are places where cartel members and coyotes rape female border crossers and hang their clothes, specifically undergarments, to mark their conquest."



What is a rape tree:



"Rape trees are trees or bushes that mark where sexual assaults have occurred by arranging the victim's undergarments on or around the trees branches or on the ground. "Rape trees" are commonly and increasingly found along the United States and Mexico borders as illegal immigration grows. Immigrant females are particularly at risk of being assaulted by the typically male "coyotes" that illegally guide them through the border area. Violent crimes including rape are rarely reported as the victims fear they may be deported after coming forward. Women often seek out birth control methods to prevent pregnancy from anticipated sexual assaults. The marked trees serve to intimidate both the illegal immigrants being guided, as well as local citizens, that the human traffickers are willing and able to commit acts of violence to gain compliance from victims and deter potential witnesses or rescuers."



Sure would be nice to put a stop to that. Bill Clinton thought so too 20 years ago, as did most Republicans and Democrats. Trump doesn't want to get rid of Mexicans, he wants to put a stop to human trafficking and cut off the flow of drugs into the US, and to do that we need to secure the border.



What does Clinton think of securing the border? She wants to leave it wide open. She wants to increase the influx of "refugees" (from the war she created!) by 500% over what we are taking in now. She wants amnesty for millions of illegals, because they are her voter base. Granting them all citizenship will guarantee so many Democrat votes that it will be impossible to hold a free and fair election again. She will have imported so many knee-jerk voters that no amount of reason and evidence will ever prevail against 30 million guaranteed Democrats.



If you like your democracy you can keep it.



The evidence is clear, only a fool, or an arms manufacturer, would think that the candidate who
promises to go to war is the safer alternative to the candidate who
promises to negotiate to keep us out of war. What happened to the anti-war movement under Bush? Did it just evaporate like morning dew? The truth is they were anti-Republicans, not anti-war. It doesn't matter if Obama kills twice as many Americans in Afghanistan than Bush did, and not a peep. Obama launches air-strikes in seven countries, not a peep. Obama brags about how he's "Really good at killing people," not a fucking peep. As long as a Democrat is killing people the supposed anti-war movement does not care.



The choice could not be any more obvious.  



Safe Bet: Trump.



And last, but certainly not least, education.



It should be obvious to anyone willing to examine the evidence, that the US has the worst education system in the developed world. The United States ranks behind Russia, Slovenia, Australia, Estonia, Vietnam, Canada, Poland, and China, to name a few. Is that any surprise? If you've been getting your news from a TV comedian it probably is. If you've been to a store and you see the kid behind the counter doesn't know how to make change, or even how to push the button to change an order, you know this is a major problem.



You already know about the clutural Marxism that has infested academia. You know about "safe spaces", "trigger warnings", and Marxists censoring the free speech of tenured professors. You know that academia is run by authoritarians who care more about hurt feelings than facts, and who believe that producing emotionally-stunted adults who act like children is all that matters.



But let's take a step back. What about the wonderful public school system? High school graduation rates are at the highest they've ever been! That's because dumb kids are being pushed through like cattle to the slaughter and programs for smart kids are being cut so the dumb kids don't feel bad for being excluded.



26% of high school graduates are below the basic reading level. This means these kids do not have the
skills necessary to perform simple and everyday literacy activities. One quarter of all high school graduates are functionally illiterate! In 1979 only 1% of graduates were illiterate, and now it's 26% thanks to "outcome-based education." Worse still, 19% of high school graduates can't read AT ALL! One in five graduates cannot read their own name.



Remember Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act"? And it's gotten worse under Common Core, where getting the correct answer is wrong unless you use all your fingers and your toes to count by ones!



The schools have failed a significant percentage of kids. People with no education and no skills, mostly poor urban blacks and Latinos, often can't get a job (see above), and in order to make money just to survive turn to crime. They turn to crime, they turn to drugs, and then they run afoul of the police. They go to prison, they die in gangland shootings, or they die in standoffs with the police. The horrible state of public education in America, combined with economic policies that ship jobs overseas, are creating the crime that is devastating minority communities. Blacks and Latinos who vote for the Bush-Obama-Clinton policies are literally voting for their own poverty and inner city violence. If black lives really mattered, if you really want police shootings to stop, you need to solve the root causes of the problem, which means fixing the economy, fixing the schools, and securing the border. And that means voting for Trump.



Not only has public school failed the children (precisely because children are not allowed to fail or be held back), but college has failed them as well. Student loan debt in the US is at $1.4 trillion! And, unlike other forms of debt, student loan debt cannot be erased through bankruptcy. It is stuck with you until you die. College tuition rates are soaring, and students are graduating with worthless degrees in gender studies or critical theory. College graduates are saddled with, on average $37,000 of debt, which at minimum wage, working 20 hours a week, minus tax, can be paid off in only 6 years, assuming you don't have to eat, or pay rent, or car insurance, or buy gas or food. And God help you if you get sick or injured. With ObamaCare deductibles at $6,000 per year, if you're lucky, you'll be paying all your doctor bills out of pocket, plus your premiums, unless you want to pay the penalty (that's totally not a tax, unless it is, depending on what bullshit the Supreme Court is using to justify the law).



And no, a $15 minimum wage won't help either. College graduates are already competing for minimum wage jobs, for which they are over-qualified, with older people who can't afford to retire, high school kids who can't read, and illegal aliens who can be paid under the table for less. The only thing a $15 minimum wage, a minimum wage well below a living wage, will do is force even more young people out of the labor market and, if they're lucky, onto welfare, and, if they're unlucky, into a life of crime. And it's mostly poor blacks and Latinos who are hurt by these failed Bush-Obama-Clinton policies.



Neither will forgiving student loan debt solve the problem? Who will pay for that $1.4 trillion? Will the Fed just print the money? Even if they do, it's the tax payers who will have to foot the bill. So you think you're debt is forgiven? Fat chance. The government will just take it out of your $15 an hour pay check. You'll be stuck paying no matter what you do. The only way to solve the student loan problem is by reforming the whole loan architecture, and by growing the economy. Only one candidate is talking about that, and it's Donald Trump.



Only Trump is talking about school choice, about vouchers for parents to send their kids to the schools they want, that best suits their child's needs. "Voucher" and "school choice" are dirty words for leftists like Clinton, but it's mostly poor blacks who benefit. A strong majority of blacks favor vouchers, and there's real evidence that even modest assistance provides a huge benefit for kids. So why do people like Clinton oppose vouchers? Is it any surprise? Her financial backers are super racist. They want to keep blacks poor and uneducated so they can promise pie-in-the-sky programs year after year, and once they get and maintain power they deliver nothing.



Clinton represents a continuation of the policies that have failed under Bush and Obama. Trump represents the kind of change that the majority of real people want and need. When it comes to education the answer couldn't be any more obvious.  



Safe Bet: Trump



When it comes to fixing the economy, providing for national security, or fixing the broken education system, the only logical choice, the only choice backed by reason and evidence is Donald Trump.



The Bush-Obama-Clinton policies have bankrupted the nation, have gotten us stuck in endless foreign wars over oil, have failed our kids, especially in the inner cities.



Clinton is the candidate of Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, the Main Stream Media, political elites in Washington from both Republican and Democratic parties, and oil sheiks from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Clinton is the candidate of ISIS and the drug cartels that traffick in sex slaves and rape women trying to cross the border. Clinton is the candidate of banker bailouts, golden parachutes, debt, and dead Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is the candidate who would do nothing to stop the massacre in Orlando, do nothing to help disabled veterans or the struggling poor, while showering "refugees" with benefits. Why doesn't she want the veterans who were wounded, physically and mentally, in the war she voted for to get benefits? Why doesn't she want poor blacks and Latinos to get benefits? Why invite tens of thousands of Syrians into America? Are there not enough struggling poor here already who desperately need help? Shouldn't they get help first?



So, what is at stake in the next election? The American dream is at stake. And no, that doesn't mean a return to Jim Crow or slavery, that doesn't mean taking away women's suffrage, that doesn't mean excluding Muslims and Mexicans from America. The American dream means schools that provide children with a proper education. It means school choice. It means a high school graduate can get a job in a factory that can provide for a family of five with a house and two cars. It means college graduates can get good jobs so that they can pay off their loans and won't have to stay at home with their parents forever. It means not getting entangled in pointless foreign wars where untold thousands die for the benefit of a few. It means solving the problems of crime, drugs, and the deterioration of the inner cities. It means keeping people out of prisons just because of a plant.



The American dream was alive and well before NAFTA gutted the middle class, before securing the border went from having bi-partisan support to being an "extreme far-right" position, that tens of millions of Americans support, but the out-of-touch elite in Washington despise. The American dream does not mean eliminating any of the strides we've made in civil rights, it means eliminating the civil wrongs the elite have imposed upon us: crippling debt, corruption, crime, terrorism, and endless foreign wars. That's it. Trump does not want to drag us back to the 1950s, he wants us to strive forward into the future, where we can all get under the big tent called America.



The elite hate us. The super rich globalists who know no allegiance to any nation, they are the enemy. Black, white, Indian, Latino, Chinese, gay, straight, Muslim, Christian, atheist, we're all Americans. The elite want to drive wedges between us, they want to get us at each other's throats to divide and rule. Trump wants to unite us all against the elite, who don't give a damn about you. Clinton doesn't care about you any more than she cares about the Syrian people she pretends to support so she can get her oil pipeline. Clinton doesn't care about you any more than she cares about the Haitians whose country she gutted. Clinton is bought and paid for by the elite who own this country and want to keep us poor and stupid and in perpetual debt. The elite hate you. They pull the strings. Now cut them.



When you vote, vote to give a finger to the elite. Vote to cut their strings. Vote to tear the whole corrupt system down. Vote to drain the swamp.



Vote for the American dream. Your dream. Your future, and your children's future.



Vote for Donald Trump.

NATO Delenda Est

Over the years, since 2002, I've intensely studied the First World War, and what we're seeing right now is a repeat of August 1914.

A century ago millions of men died for absolutely nothing, and millions more would survive with their minds and bodies destroyed. A world that had been stable for 40 years, where conflict between the great powers seemed impossible, was overturned, resulting in the rise of fascism and communism, and, ultimately, the death of an additional 150-200 million people over the 20th century.

There was no reason to fight the war. There was nothing to be gained and everything to be lost. And it all started because of the byzantine system of alliances the great powers had entangled themselves in. These alliances seemed to them to mark the end of all war, as war with any one member state would mean war with the whole world, and no rational person would want that. But, in truth, that system of alliances is what dragged the whole world into the war, turning a small regional conflict, no, a small regional incident, into a four year long meat grinder.

We find ourselves today in the same situation. NATO has 28 member states, including the world's only superpower, the United States, along with Britain, France, and some unstable places like Turkey and Albania. Just like those 1914 alliances, an attack on one member state necessitates war for all 28 members, guaranteeing that any regional disturbance will blow up into global war.

Pundits will assure the plebs that such an alliance is a safeguard against all future wars, but they're lying, just like the pundits of a century ago.

If Estonia is invaded, and at this point there is absolutely no evidence that Russia has any designs on the Baltic, that would drag the US into nuclear war with Russia. Nuclear war means death for the majority of people on the planet. Tell me, are you willing to die for Estonia? Are you willing to murder 5 billion people for Estonia? Because I'm not. And even though Russia has no intention of invading, it is the easiest thing in the world for some NATO guys in fake Russian uniforms to kill a few border guards in a false flag attack and spark a war if the neocons wanted one.

NATO was established to counter the Warsaw Pact, a similar alliance involving the Soviet Union and other eastern European communist states. The Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union are long gone. The Cold War is over, and all the cold warriors are approaching their 70s and 80s. Are you, young men, willing to die in some old man's war? Are you, young women, willing to die because some octogenarians want to stroke their egos one last time?

The recent coup attempt in Turkey and their brazen acts of shooting Russian jets should make clear to all rational people that NATO represents an existential threat to the continued existence of humanity on this planet. NATO is a ticking time bomb that, when it goes off, will start nuclear war.

Donald Trump was absolutely correct. NATO is not only obsolete, it is a suicide pact and it should be dissolved.

Evidentiality of Spiritualist Mediumship with Stephen E. Braude

Part two of yesterday's interview. Does mediumship present better evidence for survival or for living agent psi?

Cults: Veganism

Lierre Keith is a writer, radical feminist, food activist, and environmentalist (three out of four isn't bad). She's written a book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, that exposes the cult of veganism and how it is destroying the planet (literally).



Amazon's description:




Part memoir, nutritional primer, and political manifesto, this controversial examination exposes the destructive history of agriculture—causing the devastation of prairies and forests, driving countless species extinct, altering the climate, and destroying the topsoil—and asserts that, in order to save the planet, food must come from within living communities. In order for this to happen, the argument champions eating locally and sustainably and encourages those with the resources to grow their own food. Further examining the question of what to eat from the perspective of both human and environmental health, the account goes beyond health choices and discusses potential moral issues from eating—or not eating—animals. Through the deeply personal narrative of someone who practiced veganism for 20 years, this unique exploration also discusses alternatives to industrial farming, reveals the risks of a vegan diet, and explains why animals belong on ecologically sound farms.







Agriculture is tremendously destructive of the environment. The vegan lifestyle is actually the least environmentally friendly of all possible options. Forests and fields need to be cleared, habitat needs to be destroyed, aquifers need to be drained, and oil needs to be drilled to make fertiliser. The system of agribusiness we have in place right now is only possible due to massive government subsidies and petrochemical fertiliser. 5 billion people are alive today because of artificial phosphate fertilisers and ground water irrigation. Those phosphates won't last forever, and neither will the groundwater, just like the guano. Personally I suspect there's two or more centuries worth of oil that remain to be exploited, but phosphates and ground water are being depleted faster than they can be replenished, and I don't put much hope for future utopianisms. Old methods of agriculture can only supply food for about two billion people, not seven, and it takes millions of years for aquifers to fill with water and caves to fill with shit to be used to grow food for five billion real people who will die if they don't eat anything.



There was a great discovery in 1802 of something called guano. Guano is bird shit, and it is perfect for fertiliser (and for making explosives and gunpowder). The great powers of Europe waged wars and colonised the entire planet in search of guano. For thousandsof years seabirds had crapped on tiny rocks and islands, creating piles of guano hundreds of feet thick, and it only took about a century for all the guano to be mined. How long will it take for all the groundwater, phosphate, and oil to be mined? 50 years? 100? Some places like Saudi Arabia, which had tremendous aquifers, have already depleated their groundwater in a single lifetime. They engaged in massive agriculture, growing cash crops like alfalfa and soy that use a tremendous amount of water, and now that they've run out they are buying up water in the United States to grow soy on US soil, depleating our own water reserves.



Some people, most people I would assume, place hope in "future science". "Future science will solve all of our problems!" Has it? Most animals were not designed to eat corn (a human invention of the Andes peoples). But the government subsidises corn, and petrochemical fertilisers can grow a ton of it cheap, so tons of corn are grown and fed to animals to fatten them up quickly. Those animals, because they are eating junk and living in their own shit in cages too small to move, need to be pumped with antibiotics to keep from dropping dead. Massive reliance on antibiotics in factory farms have produced superbugs that are now resistant to all of our drugs of last resort. Just this year colistin, a drug so potent and toxic that it was used only to combat bacteria that would respond to no other treatment, has just met its match in drug resistant superbugs. How could this happen? Because although colostin was only very rarely used in humans, China pumped tons of the stuff into pigs and chickens to keep them from dropping dead in hideously polluted factory farms. Just this May the first colostin-resistant bacteria was discovered. We have no idea if that bacteria has escaped into the wild. Even if it has not we're not too far away from a time when all antibiotics are rendered useless (unless we develop new ones, and there haven't been any new antibiotics in decades). In a single lifetime we have seen the rise and fall of drugs to combat disease.



It's not just superbugs, it's our own bodies too. We're not designed to ingest massive quantities of grown hormone, antibiotics, estrogen from birth control that ends up in the water supply, and all the other toxic crap we're putting into food to grow lots of it really quick and make it last forever.



What if "future science" doesn't solve all of our problems? What is "future science" anyway? It's that stuff no one wants to invest in because it's not two hundred year old science. I love oil. I'm sitting on oil, typing on oil, looking at pictures projected on oil, in a house lit by oil, and I eat food that exists only because of oil, but maybe we should be investing in things beside oil because it's stupid to rely on only one kind of power source, just in case something bad happens to it?



Getting beyond that, the human body isn't designed to eat a plant diet. Most plants are toxic and need to be cooked to destroy those toxins before it is safe to eat them. Even then, most plants aren't too good for your body anyway, and cellulose is impossible to digest, so most of what you're eating just ends up filling the toilet. Some animals can digest plants, animals with very long, complicated guts. Pack hunters like humans, have shorter guts designed to digest meat from animals with longer guts. Herbivores do all the work, we get all the benefit. It's win-win really. Cows, sheep, and pigs are tremendously successful species, because they taste good. Domesticated animals have a very good chance of reproducing. That's why there are billions of them. These animals have thrived, while their wild counterparts have gone extinct, because they have adapted to life under human control. Eating meat keeps many species from going extinct, keeps wilderness land from being destroyed and turned into farms, and provides the human body what it needs to survive.



That said, there's a right and a wrong way to raise animals. The factory farms that pump animals full of antibiotics is the wrong way. What's the right way? Read the book.

Philosophy and Post-Mortem Survival with Stephen E. Braude

Stephen Braude discusses philosophical questions related to survival of consciousness. He brings up two interesting points. First, that we're thinking of "super psi" wrong (he prefers to call it "living agent psi"). Most people think of the "super" more like super hero rather than super glue. It is not psi above and beyond anything we have experienced before, it is just really good quality psi (the issue of some remarkably accurate remote viewers was brought up. Check out Joe McMoneagle's Memoirs of a Psychic Spy, now in the convenient book section, for some stories.). Second, survival necessitates super psi, in that deceased persons would need remarkable ESP abilities to communicate with one another and the living, and to know what the living are currently doing, since they lack the five physical senses.

The Great War Avoided?

What if Russia did not declare war on Austria-Hungary in 1914?

Had Russia decided to stay out of the war then the guns of August would have fired on a much reduced theater. There would be no Great War. Without Russia coming to the aid of Serbia as the great protector of all Slavic peoples, Germany would not have entered the war. No Germany, no France, no intrusion on Belgian neutrality, no Britain, no Great War. One event set off the other in a chain reaction that turned a simple regional tussle into a global disaster that destroyed the old world order and provided the impetus for the birth of communism and Nazism.

So why did Russia go to war? Because they saw themselves as big brother to tiny little Serbia. Serbia is a newcomer on the world stage, and they might seem weak after fighting two wars in the previous two years. Austria was a great power, allegedly, and they were itching for a war with Serbia for years. The death of Franz Ferdinand was just a pretext. The ultimatum that was delivered to Serbia to avoid war was designed to be unacceptable. Austrian brass knew Serbia would never capitulate to so many outrageous demands. Everyone else knew so too, and even the Kaiser begged Franz Joseph to be more reasonable.

What everyone knew turned out to be wrong. Serbia, eager to avoid war, did capitulate to the shopping list of unreasonable demands. Unfortunately they were about 20 minutes late in delivering the telegram, so Austria went to war. The Kaiser pleaded again, but the Austrians would hear none of it.

Now this clearly appears to be a David versus Goliath situation, and I would agree, but one needs to remember that David won with a single shot! The story of David and Goliath is that of a foe who appears to be invincible but is really fatally flawed, versus an opponent who appears to be small and weak but who is really swift and brilliant, and capable of delivering a fatal blow before the enemy has time to react. While on paper Serbia looked hopelessly outclassed, the reality was the exact opposite.

The Austrian military was weak, calcified, and decrepit. There was no cohesion within the empire, that was threatening to rend itself in three directions. Austria-Hungary really was a very sick empire. The Hungarians constantly tried to stonewall every piece of legislation the Austrians tried to pass. Emperor Franz Joseph, then age 84, had sat on the throne for 66 years! The people considered him to be the immortal Emperor, because multiple generations had lived and died under his rule. There was hardly a subject alive who remembered a time before this tired old man ruled. Several times he dissolved the Hungarian government to curb their defiance, and it was only he who could hold the empire together. The moment the emperor took his last breath it would only be months before three nationalities who were constantly at each other's throats would tear the empire apart.

Franz Joseph lived to see Austria's fall from grace in the Austro-Prussian War. Prussia was now the new head of the German peoples, and their military seemed unstoppable. Austria was old, and empire of geriatrics, unable to think outside of the mouldy box that had been stored in an antiquated cedar chest for centuries. Reform was impossible, and, as a result, Austria would never be able to adapt to modern warfare.

Serbia, on the other hand, was just the opposite. The Kingdom of Serbia was young and new, and, unlike most other European nation states, was ruled by a Serb king, not a German! Instead of approaching the Germans on bent knee, begging for an inbred king, the Serbs pulled one of their own out of the mud, a peasant farmer, and made him king. A full-blood Serb ruled over the Serbs, and the people were beaming with pride.

Time and again we see that superior numbers and equipment is no match for superior training and will to fight. Serbia looked weak after fighting to Balkan Wars. Their territory had increased dramatically, and it appeared that they could not sustain a fight against a far superior enemy. The treasury had been drained, and supplies were short. Austria attacked with twice the number of men, with far better equipment and supplies, and a whole war industry to support it. It should have been an easy victory for Austria, which is why Russia decided to intervene on Serbia's behalf.

That intervention might not have been necessary, and, either way, ultimately led to the near total destruction of Serbia by involving it in a larger war.

The Austrian brass, commanded by General Oskar Potiorek, suffered from impulsivity, lack of imagination, and near incompetence. Potiorek made a disastrous initial move that was so poorly conceived that the Serbians initially didn't believe the Austrian army would commit itself to an attack in the mountains where maneuver was impossible. After four days of fierce fighting Serbia emerged victorious, pushing the Austrians back.

Austria would hammer again, hoping to use their numbers to wear the Serbians down. With little in the way of ammunition, Serbia fell back in a strategic retreat, leading the Austrians into a trap. The Serbian army suffered, to be sure, from lack of supplies, fatigue, and poor weather, but morale held, and the scorched earth policy hampered the Austrian advance. By the end of November the Austrian army found itself in barren countryside, surrounded by mountains and fortifications Serbia had prepared months in advance. Finally, under cover of a heavy storm, the two armies clashed on the banks of the Kolubara River. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, the Serbian army held its ground in the south, while strategically withdrawing from Belgrade in the north.

Thinking they were winning, and fearing the army would outstrip its supply line, the Austrians halted. Seizing the initiative, the Serbians moved in to encircle the Austrian army, which had failed to prepare for a counter-attack. Serbian morale soared. Serbia advanced behind the Austrian lines, capturing tens of thousands of Austrians in a ten day offensive, suffering few casualties. By 15 December the Austrian army had retreated fully across the Danube.

Austria-Hungary had been soundly humiliated. They had failed in all their objectives. This tiny upstart had routed their massive and majestic army that was once the pride of Europe for centuries. Appalled by the atrocities committed by the Austrians, and inspired by the tremendous victory of so few fighting against so many, nations all over the world rallied to Serbia's cause.

Serbia had suffered tremendous losses, to their army and civilians, but they had emerged victorious against one of the great powers. They were jubilant, proud, and admired around the world. Had this been a regional war Serbia could have rested on its laurels as a rising power who had just won a seemingly impossible victory. Austria-Hungary would be left sulking, and may have to deal with insurrection in Bosnia if the people were rallied by the great Slavic victory. Had this been a regional war it would have ended here, status quo ante bellum.

But this was not a regional war, this was a world war, and it was far from over.

Nearly one year later, in October 1915, Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany and Bulgaria, launched a two-pronged invasion of little Serbia. Unable to fend off attacks from three armies, the Serbian army retreated through a very hostile Albania, losing hundreds of thousands of men to privation, terrible weather, disease epidemic, and constant harassment. Hundreds of thousands more civilians would die under an Austrian policy of genocide. By war's end Serbia had lost one quarter of its population.

The Mystery Of The Shemitah

Jonathan Cahn explains what he calls "The Mystery Of The Shemitah" for 77 minutes. Basically, there's this Biblical injunction that every 7th year the Jews were supposed to stop working and erase all debts (I'm still wondering what they were supposed to eat), but the Jews always defy God's comands, so they ignored this injunction for 490 years. As a result the Babylonians came in and destroyed Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile for 70 years - one year for every sabbath year ("shemitah") they had ignored. At the end of 70 years the Persians come in and wipe out the Babylonians and the Persian king Cyrus rebuilds Jerusalem and puts the Jews back in their homeland.



Rabbi Cahn says the same rule applies to the United States, because the US was unique in that it was the only modern state that was founded on the principles of God's word, in effect setting up a new covenant like the one the Jews had thousands of years ago.



1870 - shemitah year - the US surpasses Britain as the largest economy on the planet

1917 - shemitah year - the US becomes a superpower

1945 - shemitah year - a new financial world order is established based on the US dollar



As long as the US (this rule only applies to the US and Israel) stays right with God then every seventh year will be a blessing, but if the US defies God then every seventh year will be a curse.



1973 - shemitah year - the US legalises abortion, defying God

2001 - shemitah year - 9/11, the symbol of America's economic might - the World Trade Center, which was built in 1973 - is destroyed, followed by a huge financial collapse of the stock market

2008 - shemitah year - the Great Recession starts, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (which also started on a shemitah year)



What happens next? I don't know. The last shemitah year was September 2014 to September 2015, which passed, and while there weren't any further economic disasters or terror attacks, the Supreme Court did deem itself infinite power over all aspects of everyone's lives allegedly to protect the "rights" of maybe one tenth of seven tenths of one percent of the population, but really it was a naked power grab that followed 30 years of public indoctrination to move the overton window.



Is there anything to this? I don't know. This might all just be coincidence. It is an interesting hypothesis, and it is an interesting lecture.

Spirit Possession with Terence Palmer

"We have to acknowledge the simple fact
that we are a possessing spirit. We are a spirit entity that
possesses a physical form, and that's the fundamental groundwork that
we have to work from."



Terry Palmer, PhD, is author of The Science of Spirit Possession. He is a
member of the Society for Psychical Research as well as the Scientific
and Medical Network. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of
Medicine.



Here notes that, while there are many negative
connotations to the term spirit possession, there are also positive
examples. He describes his encounter with an ostensible spirit who
identified itself as Lao Tsu. He also presents an example of a negative
encounter. He notes that it can be extremely difficult to distinguish
between an autonomous spirit entity, such as the spirit of someone who
is deceased, and thought-forms of our own creation. Both types of
phenomena can possess an individual.

Reincarnation in Early Church Politics

A lot of people tend to say that the Council of Nicea in 325 outlawed belief in reincarnation so the bishops could control people. If you only have one life then they can control you.



This is incorrect for two reasons. First, reincarnation was not discussed at the Council of Nicea. The closest thing to reincarnation was the pre-existence of the soul, and that was declared anathema in 553 at the Second Ecumenical Council of Constantinople. That would rule out reincarnation by extension, but reincarnation itself was not mentioned there either.



A number of heavy hitters within the early church did oppose the idea of reincarnation, and the general push seems to have come from Irenaeus who lived in the second century. Irenaeus lived during a time when Rome regularly, and often brutally, persecuted Christians. He found himself in charge of a sizable Christian community basically because all the people above him in the area had been killed. There was a lot of confusion and discord within the community, so he thought that if Christianity was to survive there needed to be unity of belief. There had to be one catholic (meaning universal) church.



So Irenaeus went around condemning people he saw as heretics. But he didn't do it out of desire for political power. Partly it was driven by fear. If Christians can't agree on anything then the whole movement might vanish in the face of Roman persecution. Another driving force behind his condemnation was because there really were a whole lot of fruitcakes out there. There were people trying to establish cults of personality, who preached that they could give you all the power of prophecy and unless every person was a prophet then you weren't really born again. You don't even have to think about it to see that this is insane. People take some initiation by a charismatic and then they get up on stage and start spouting whatever nonsense comes to mind as if it were genuine prophecy. Irenaeus did believe in genuine prophecy. He himself had had veridical visions (the death of his teacher Polycarp being one such vision). But there is no way to approach this idea that everyone gets to be a prophet in a rational way. You can't possibly test it. If everyone is a prophet then someone with impure motives can lead a whole lot of weak minded people astray. Irenaeus said that prophecy should be checked against what is written in the gospels (and you need to know which gospels are real in order to check, and Irenaeus was a driving force behind the establishment of the four canonical gospels as canon).



A spiritual successor of Irenaeus, Athanasius, was one of the chief opponents of Arius, whose beliefs were denounced at Nicea. Arius believed Christ was created by God and that the Holy Spirit wasn't even part of God at all. Athanasius was by no means popular. He was exiled several times but he kept managing to worm his way back into his old position as Bishop of Alexandria. I wouldn't say he had political motives, he probably was genuine in his beliefs.



Neither did Constantine himself have any political motives. He too was genuine in his beliefs, and he was a very simple man who wanted to keep everything simple. He convened the Council at Nicea to work out the basics that every Christian should believe, sort of to set out a definition, but he also believed that there was room for congenial debate and disagreement on particulars. He wasn't trying to beat anyone over the head with doctrine. There were times when the bishops were carrying on and he had to step in to resolve issues just to keep the council moving, but it wasn't out of any particular political agenda.



We then move on to the council in 553 and the rejection of Origenism. I don't see this as a power play either. Origen taught, like Arius, that Christ is less than God and is of a different substance than God. What he believed in regard to reincarnation specifically seems to depend on who you ask (and the agenda of who you ask). He believed in the pre-existence of the soul, definitely. All souls were created, not at conception out of nothing as if sperm and egg have magic powers, but by God prior to the creation of the universe. All souls started out as perfectly good, but they have free will, so some of them got bored of contemplating God all the time and they rebelled. When Origen talks about bad deeds souls did in their previous lives he seems to be talking about what souls did in Heaven prior to birth in a human body, not successive human lives on Earth. He also taught that all souls will eventually return to their primordial state of purity, so Hell is not eternal, even if it lasts a really long time.



The problem is that Origen wrote such a vast library of work that it's practically impossible for any one person to read, let alone comprehend, all of it. Whether he believed in reincarnation as such is not important, to me at least, because rejection of pre-existence of the soul automatically rules out reincarnation.



This is all just a side note, however, because the primary goal of the 553 council was the rejection of Nestorianism, which is an entirely different issue unto itself. Origen was just sort of tacked on as a rider. If there were political motivations at the council they weren't the bishop's motivations, they were the motivations of the Emperor Justinian himself. The "Church Fathers," or whoever, weren't trying to control people's lives, it was Justinian. Justinian was a despot and a tyrant and he believed himself to be the world's one true authority on absolutely everything. Anyone who disagreed with him on anything had to face his wrath. If anyone wanted to control a person's one and only life it was Justinian, not anyone within the church, but even Justinian's grip on power could not last forever, and bickering over minor issues would continue. (For example, the Cathars in the 13th and 14th
centuries believed in reincarnation, and they were pretty popular in
what is now southern France, until the king of France had them killed
for political reasons.)



Aside from the no pre-existence thing, I don't really see the control issue entering in. Most theologians just believed that the soul was created either by God at conception or somehow the soul was created by the union of sperm and egg (creationism and traducianism). However prevalent belief in reincarnation was for early Christians, it just seems to have died out by inertia. Theologians accepted the ruling against pre-existence, so they just didn't question it. Not questioning things is something adults do as a matter of being adults, that has nothing to do with trying to impose a power structure from the top down, it's about fitting into a power structure from the bottom up out of pressure for acceptance. People want to fit in. "If my teacher doesn't believe in reincarnation, then neither will I. Please like me." You have a handful of unpopular people with an unpopular idea, and over time there are fewer and fewer supporters until there are none left. That's just how things work.

Judging Judgment

Twice this past week I've read, in two different books, that judgment gives you power over people, or at least it gives you the illusion of power, and that's why you should never do it. I don't believe either of those statements.



First off, Jesus commands us to judge. Idiots, or lazy people, or narcissists, or sybarites read "Judge not..." and then black out the rest of the chapter because they satisfied their craven desire to avoid judgment. But if you actually read it, and you're not using one of the modern pussy "translations", what Jesus is telling us is not to judge others by a different standard than the one we use to judge ourselves. He flat out says "Don't be a hypocrite" (a Greek word that only a Greek-speaking audience would understand, indicating that Greek was Jesus' native language, which makes perfect sense since it was the official language of the whole eastern Mediterranean for the previous three hundred years and the language spoken in all the big cities where Jesus worked), not "Don't judge anyone under any circumstances ever".



Later in Matthew Jesus says if you see your brother trespass against you tell him so he can correct his action.



Then we have in John where Jesus says to "Judge righteously".



And Paul continues reasserting the need for right judgment by rebuking the Corinthians for not judging one of their own who had sinned.



It becomes a matter of who am I going to believe, Jesus or some pop culture writer? Not that difficult a choice.



The whole idea of not judging comes from the perverted anything goes "If it feels good do it" mentality that poisoned a generation in the 60s and has been used to brainwash children in the schools for the past 30 years. And the people who say not to judge almost always do so ironically, because they are judging while they admonish judging! The statement is self-defeating, like the assertion that Absolute Truth does not exist. If you judge people for judging then you are the very thing you allege (it's a lie) to despise, which is itself a judgment and is itself what Jesus rebuked in the part of the verse you blacked out!



And second, I don't think judging others puts you in a position of power, at least perceived, over that person. Not if you're using right judgment as you are commanded to. If you're judging everyone, including yourself, by the same standard then how does that put you in a position of power? You are also among the group being judged, and the standard of judgment is not based on your own caprice but on what is True.



I know I fall short of the standards by which I judge. Does that mean I'm placing myself in a position of power over myself? Does that even make sense? How can I have power over myself other than through willed action? In order to exert power there must be a self and an other, but if there is just a self then there can be no exertion of power, and no relationship of any kind.



If you see someone with an untied shoe and you say "Your shoe's untied," you don't have power over that person, you just have a different perspective, and you're using that perspective to help that person. That's compassion, not power. You would want the other person to do the same for you. That's right judgment. If you're doing something stupid and self-destructive you would want, at least subconsciously, someone to tell you, just as you would tell someone who you see doing something self-destructive, out of compassion, not power.



People today have the wrong view of sin. Sin is not about angering God or about anyone holding power over anyone else, it's natural law. If you do this, you will get this. If you try to unbalance the universe the universe will take steps to rebalance itself. And you can never win. Sin should be thought of like causality. If you smoke heroin you destroy your body and have to face the physical consequences regardless of whether you're a good person or not (unless you're Keith Richards, then your body is indestructible); if you rape children you destroy your soul and you face the metaphysical consequences. I picked a particularly obvious example, but it gets subtler than that. Sin says that actions (and thoughts) have consequences because the mind works in a certain way and garbage accumulates over a lifetime and there's no way to escape that no matter how good we are at ignoring it or rationalising it away. At death we are exposed to the clear light of Absolute Reality, and it becomes impossible to lie to ourselves. Beliefs go out the window and then the shadow has free reign to torment you mercilessly.



It's true from an Absolute perspective to say not to judge, but that's because 1. from the perspective of the Absolute NOTHING is happening, there is no manifestation, so there is literally nothing to judge, and 2. the people who say not to judge aren't speaking about the Absolute, they're sybarites who don't want to feel bad about smoking crack and having lots of anonymous sex. 1 out of 1,000 people who say not to judge even believe in the Absolute. The other 999 are materialists who believe that when you die you rot, in which case judging still wouldn't be wrong because there would be no truth at all. Not only would judging not be wrong, if you took the view of the materialists to its logical conclusion, but absolutely nothing would be wrong, including raping and murdering the person who told you not to judge just for the lulz, and furthermore there would be no free will so it wouldn't even make sense to speak of right and wrong anyway.



There's a reason why the noble eightfold path begins with right views and moves on to right speech, right action, and right livelihood. If we just take a purely Absolute view when looking at spiritual practice (like the Course, which is 100% Absolute and ignores the relative completely), then we can say not to judge. It can be done, just as it's possible to climb a sheer cliff, but taking the steepest possible path isn't very useful if your aim is to get as many people to Absolute realisation as possible. That's why great teachers throughout history have given us morality, which is relative bodhicitta, because our minds have been trapped in the relative world for so long that we need relative practices to break down our barriers. We need to exhaust the relative mind so the clear light of Absolute awareness can shine through. Morality does not get us enlightenment, because nothing can. Nothing can take us to where we always already are. Morality serves as a means of making us more likely to see that we already are enlightened. Morality reduces the obstacles within our relative minds and the relative world.



You can say that judgment makes no sense from the Absolute perspective, but you can't build a society in the relative world based on the Absolute. Talk of judgment, sin, and morality have meaning in the relative world. They are relative practices for the relative world, because the alternative is close to impossible. We can take the Absolute view all we want, but until we are fully enlightened we are still at the mercy of our relative mind, and we will still have to deal with fear, doubt, regret, shame, etc. And until we are enlightened we still need judgment in order to overcome the relative mind.

The Origin and Solution to Violence

I am convinced that the vast majority of violence in the world is caused by bad parenting. Yes, a very small minority of people are naturally evil, but we can put systems in place to deal with them effectively. Most people, however, are evil because how they were raised. No one saw the warning signs at an early stage and dealt with them. And the reason for that is because well over 99% of all parents have no clue what they're doing. They never learned to develop the proper faculties, so they fall back on the same devious tricks their parents used to raise them, and the great circle of crap makes another turn.

What is violence? Violence isn't just hitting. In fact, violence mostly has no physical component at all. Most violence is psychological. Lying, bribing, using guilt or shame or envy to manipulate, hypocrisy, threatening, all forms of deception and mind games are forms of violence.

Why do people lie? Because their parents lied to them so they think lying is acceptable. People see all the horrible things their parents do to them as children, and it forms a mental program. If parents can do it to children, which should be the closest bond, and that's okay, then there should be no problem doing it to a stranger. It is a self-perpetuating system.

Children are a parent's number one priority. Children are a parent's number two priority. Children are a parent's number one hundred priority. Everything else is dust in the wind. You made the mess, you opened the door and brought someone into this world - without consent - who will suffer, grow old, and die. You did that, now it is your responsibility to fix it. You created this disaster of human suffering, now it is your responsibility to alleviate it.

Similarly, the solution to violence in the world is good parenting. That too is a self-perpetuating system. The more good parents there are the more children will grow up to become good parents, and then the system will flip and violence will diminish.

There is no other solution.

The Apports of Amyr Amiden with Stanley Krippner

A fantastic discussion with Stanley Krippner and Jeffrey Mishlove.



Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Saybrook University,
is a Fellow in five APA divisions, and past-president of two divisions
(30 and 32).



Here he describes his research in Brazil with an unusual spiritist
medium, Amyr Amiden, who had the ability to produce apports. Krippner
describes how his team observed over ninety instances of objects simply
appearing in mid-air and dropping to the ground in front of startled
observers. The objects included semi-precious stones, medallions, and
even jewelry. Many research papers were published regarding these
observations. Furthermore, the research team was able to record various
physiological, and geomagnetic, measurements while the phenomena
occurred. Krippner’s studies are probably the most extensive, scientific
observations of apports on record.



Runs 30 minutes

Self-Acceptance

Self-acceptance is not accepting yourself as you are, with all your faults, that is shadow hugging. Self-acceptance is about accepting who you really are: the true Self, free from delusion and attachment.

The Gods Themselves

"Eyewitness reports of human encounters
with "supernatural beings" have been documented as far back
as the painted caves of Upper Paleolithic Europe 35,000 years ago and
brought right up to date with bizarre accounts of abductions by
aliens in the twenty-first century. Such reports include powerful
common themes... that science is unable to explain."
 



Supernatural: Meetings with the
Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Revised Edition, Graham Hancock,
page 269



What are the gods? Could billions of people from pre-history have believed in lies, founded on nothing but the hollow words of priests? Or were the gods based on some truth, some genuine metaphysical intelligence that humans contacted and communed with?



The gods, or the germ of the gods, began as extensions of the Truth. For whatever reason they fragmented; were rent from Truth and thrust into contact with the world: Dionysus, Anubis, Azazel, Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli*, and others. Not all the gods, most are just myth; the personification of abstract thought. Did the average Greek believe in Zeus, or Athena, or Ares? Probably not. They represented aspects of human psychology and served as a means of learning these truths, just as ego, superego, and id centuries later.



Ares and Athena are both gods of war - personifications of abstract
ideas - but they signify different approaches to war. Ares represents
the old style of fighting, like Achilles or barbarians; men who fight
for personal glory and bloodlust. Athena represents civilised warfare,
with strategy and tactics and allegiance to the city-state. Stories involving the two were commentaries on societal evolution, from archaic to classical; from tribes and kinship groups to political entities that united multiple disparate families.



However, some gods represent genuine aspects of Truth that can be approached through transpersonal experience: the original teachers of mankind. Millions of people, from all times and all nations, speak of meeting the same entities through the use of drugs, fasting, or rhythmic dance. They cannot all be sharing in the same hallucination, or else be imitating one another from reading past accounts. No, these experiences must point to a genuine reality.



Over the countless eons, psychic garbage has accumulated around these fragments and they've taken on lives of their own. What began as projections of Truth were, through prolonged exposure to the collective shadow of humanity, rendered into entities with thoughts and personalities all their own. Wise and powerful beyond all conception, yet totally dependent upon humans for their existence. This is the condition of the gods. A lack of prayers cannot starve them, as in Aristophanes' The Birds, or has commonly been believed throughout the centuries. They do not need us to believe. Our beliefs merely give definition to their form. They have appeared in every culture under many names. All they require is the continuation within the collective unconscious of the same thought patterns, the same vortices, that created them. And so it does not matter if you believe in Anubis per se, it is the psychopomp, the one who delivers souls from this world to the next. Call it Yama, or the Grim Reaper, or Charon, or the Being of Light, it is still the same entity by whatever name you give it, and so long as the need remains for such a being, so shall it continue to exist, in all the different guises disparate cultures have given it.



That is the folly of man, thinking himself Adam, with the power to change the essence of a thing by changing its name. Water is still the same whether it is in a pot, or a towel, or on the floor, or in a cloud, or ice. A man is still a man, whatever mask he wears, by whatever name he refers himself. You cannot change a horse into a cow by changing the definition of "cow" to include horses, nor can you affect the gods by believing, or disbelieving, or by granting them different titles. You can lie to all the world, but in the pure light of Truth you cannot lie to yourself, and you will find, when you die, the lies you've told become chains and anchors preventing you from ascending to the Truth.



These gods are not the God, and though they live a long time, they are not immortal, and must return to the Truth eventually, when humanity has evolved and there is no further need for this world. On the contrary, a true immortal, though his body may die, his soul will remain as the unique expression of his being, even when his identity shifts from the individual to the Truth itself, dissolving the illusion of separation. The soul of the immortal is indestructible, even if he does not see himself as the individual.



In part two I will look at the nature of that which we call God.





*The god of human sacrifice. The Aztecs were unique in all the world for the sheer brutality and the numbers of their victims. Something, very dark and diabolical, had to compel the Aztecs to commit ritualised murder on such an enormous scale.

Sai Baba in Badrinath

June 1961, Sathya Sai Baba and his retinue visited the holy city of Badrinath near where the river Ganges enters India.

Britain Should Not Have Fought in the First World War

Here is a 1 hour 40 minute debate on the issue of whether Britain should have stayed out of the First World War.







I'm very surprised by this outcome. British people, apparently, can be moved by debate. This is in contrast to my own hypothesis that debate accomplishes nothing. What is also interesting is that 10% of the audience did not vote the second time.

Proposition----------------------------Before---After
Britain should not have fought------19-------27
Britain should have fought-----------40-------62
Don't know--------------------------------41-------1

The speakers who thought Britain should have fought constantly made reference to WWII and tried to conflate the Kaiser to Hitler and the Nazis, because the position would have been untenable otherwise. They say that the Germans executing 7000 Belgian civilians was the worst atrocity ever until the Holocaust and was more than enough justification for Britain to go to war, but ignore the millions of Congolese the Belgians murdered under King Leopold's reign. I have no sympathy for the Belgians. They were horrible people in 1914 and they're still the absolute moral anus of the entire universe in 2016. The Belgians are the most immoral people who have ever lived, and if 7000 had to die to assure a quick, largely bloodless war between Germany and France in a repeat of 1870, then so be it. Had the BEF not stepped in at the Marne in 1914 there would have been no WWI. The Ottomans and Italy would not have entered, France would have been defeated in a few months (the German army was very close to Paris in September), and Russia, having lost all its allies, would have sued for peace.

France and Russia have always been the historical enemies of Britain. Russia, in particular, under the Tsar, was the most repressive state in Europe at the time. They were much worse than the Germans, who had the highest standard of living, the highest concentration of scientific and artistic geniuses, and the most freedom of any of the peoples on the continent.

The only allegedly bad thing the Germans did was engage in a very brief arms race in the building of warships, with an explicit goal of far less than the British navy. The Germans never wanted to be a threat, and they quickly abandoned the aim of expanding their own navy. Really, Germany just wanted its own place in the sun. The ancient regimes of Europe had already established their own global empires, and Germany, barely 40 years old by that point, wanted a little something for itself. They didn't want to conquer the world, or even Europe, they didn't want to depose Britain's rule of the sea, they didn't want lebensraum or to exterminate people, the Germans were not a threat to Britain. And if the Germans had political domination Europe in 1914, would that really be such a bad thing? Not for Britain. Germany would have in a stroke defeated Britain's two chief rivals. France would no longer be posturing in Africa, and Russia would no longer be trying to make inroads in Afghanistan. Britain would have come out on top had Germany won a brief European war in 1914!

Furthermore, had Germany won in 1914 the great problems of the 20th and 21st centuries would likely not have happened, certainly not to the scale that they did. The collapse of the European colonial empires led to massive problems that continue to this day. You can't expect to introduce cavemen to the 20th century and have them become modern people in a single generation. Because the colonies in Africa had lasted for such a brief time there was no chance for the African peoples to modernise sufficiently to allow for self-rule in a modern global society. You give modern weapons to cavemen you're going to have a bad time. The Europeans introduce guns and a global economy and then after a generation they leave. It's no surprise Africa is so fraught with corruption and genocide today, the natural violent tendencies of peoples who have been slaughtering one another for millennia had now been given geopolitcal legitimacy and modern weapons.

The partition of India was a disaster. The British knew it would have happened, and they just drew a line on a map, threw up their hands, and left. For 500 years the Muslims had brutally subjugated the Indians. In a free and democratic India, with Muslims outnumbered 10 to 1, their grip on power would evaporate and fear of reprisal loomed. Rather than take responsibility like adults, the British instead split India into Muslim Pakistan, and Everyone else India, and then left knowing 2 million people would be killed in the mass exodus that was to follow.

And let us not forget Arabia. You kick the Turks out and promise the Hashemite dynasty self-rule and then you stab them in the back, give half the land to the French who did absolutely nothing to deserve it, and renege on your promise to defend the Arabs from the vicious, repressive, theocratic Saudi clan who swept in and took control, introducing Wahhabism to the region, creating the second moral anus of the universe and sewing the seeds of global Islamic terrorism.

And that's just the colonies! Had Germany won in 1914 there would never have been a Holocaust. The Nazis would have never taken power and Hitler would have starved on the streets of Vienna. Lenin would have never escaped his exile and communism would never have taken hold in Russia, leading to the disaster of tens of millions of dead and the terror of Stalin. There would have been no Second World War that left 60 million dead if Germany had won in 1914. Without communism in Russia there would have been no rise of Mao in China, with the 500 million dead in the wake of the most repressive regime in human history. Tibet and Turkestan would be free. There would be no Cold War, no divided Korea, no Vietnam, no war in Afghanistan, or in Iraq. Had Britain stayed out of the war and allowed Germany to have a quick victory hundreds of millions of people would not have been murdered and the world would be a far safer place today.

Sri Sathya Sai Mobile Hospital

Sathya Sai Baba created a mobile hospital unit as an extension of his free health service to the poor. They travel around Andhra Pradesh to serve villagers who cannot travel to brick and mortar hospitals.



Runs 15 minutes.

A Very Brief Introduction to Dragons

Were dragons real? Think about it, virtually every culture on earth, throughout all of history, has spoken of giant flying reptiles. All these stories can't possibly trace back to a single source. There has to be something deeper going on here.

The obvious problem is we don't find dragon bones. But we don't find the bones of lots of things. The number of unique human fossils could fill a bathtub, and a great many dinosaur species are known from a single bone (including the largest dinosaur ever discovered, which was identified by one bone that was destroyed in WWII in an air raid, and no other bones have been discovered since). Since fossils of anything are very rare it is not at all surprising that dragon fossils are rare, or non-existent.

What if we are looking in the wrong place?

People from all over the world who take certain hallucinogenic plants report seeing the same beings. One commonly encountered being is a man with an alligator head, and this alligator headed man says the same things to everyone. It can't all be a case of suggestion, where people encounter what they expect based on second-hand sources. What I suspect is that these are real non-physical beings who don't look like anything, being non-physical, but they assume a certain form in the mind of the person having the experience out of convenience.

What if dragons are like that? Dragons are not flesh and blood reptiles, they are non-physical beings encountered in altered states. That would explain why they can live for thousands of years, why they are wise beyond the limits of human intelligence, and why they are only encountered at the end of an arduous quest undertaken by an individual who has had specific preparation. What if going out to slay a dragon did not involve a knight suiting up in armor and riding off to battle a dinosaur, what if it involved fasting, and sensory deprivation, and ingesting certain hallucinogenic plants, and then the knight doesn't kill the dragon, the knight's encounter with the dragon allows him to eliminate negative qualities within himself? That is why only particularly pure knights of great spiritual fortitude could go out to meet with dragons, because the psychic shock would be disastrous for a lesser mortal (like a very bad trip). In that sense then dragons are not the enemy, they are the ally.

Post Economics

Here's my take on the issue of capitalism versus socialism. Neither of these systems are ends in themselves, only means to an end, and that end is what I'll call "Post Economics". Post economics is a social order that has no economic system at all because people have evolved beyond the need for one. That may sound like fantasy, but there are examples of post economic societies that have existed for thousands of years. They are called monasteries.

The monastery is an enclosed society with very little contact with the outside world. Many are completely self-sufficient. They may start out with donations from outside, from a parent monastery or whatever, of things like building supplies and tools, but from then on everything they need is manufactured within the monastery itself. Food is grown, sheep might be raised for wool to make clothing, trees planted to supply wood, and so on.

Some people might fear losing things they value in a monastic society, but nothing of any value is lost.

Ambition. Monks have no ambition! Yes, yes they do, otherwise they would have never joined the monastery in the first place. The ambition of the monk is the supreme ambition of enlightenment (Kenosis in the Christian tradition, Moksha in Vedanta, Nirvana in Buddhism). All earthly ambitions are but pale reflections of the supreme ambition. On the relative side there is the fulfillment of perfect morality. What is missing is the ambition to collect stuff. Instead of buying new chrome hubcaps or building a gazebo or whatever, you would rather spend that energy helping the less fortunate, the sick, the disabled, the homeless.

Individuality. Well, certainly monks lack individuality! Not true. They may dress the same, and eat the same food, but they do that by choice. Individual monks still possess their individual talents, and it is part of the perfection of morality to develop those talents to their utmost for the benefit of others. If someone is good at medicine that person serves as the doctor. If someone is good at smithing that person maintains the metal tools, monks who can sing serve in the choir, scholars can become experts in particular fields.

Science is not lost in the monastery. The opposite is true, monasteries saved science from being destroyed in the West, and most of the great scientists of the past 500 years started out as monks. It is only very recently that the religious institutions of higher learning have secularised and a small group of atheist scientists have began saying science and religion are incompatible.

Neither is art, or music, or literature lost in a monastic society. Monks still produce great art and great music, they just don't put on a concert to get a lot of money, score some coke, and bang some groupies in a different city every night.

Hedonistic pursuits are lost, but they are also lost in communism since communism sees work as its own reward and wanton sex and drug use as a waste of energy that could be used to work, so the loss of hedonism would only be a problem as far as capitalism and European socialism are concerned.

The primary thing that is lost is selfishness. The thought "What's in it for me?" is the primary casualty of the monastic system. Monks don't ask "What's in it for me?" they do their work out of a sense of duty, to help others and to glorify God. If it's your time to scrub the floors or wash the dishes you don't complain how you would rather listen to Metallica or chopping fire wood. Monks do not act to see what they can gain, they act to see what they can give. Farmers grow crops, doctors heal people, tailors sew robes, and carpenters build things not because they can get money to buy a new Lamborghini (or Toyota), or ridiculous outfits that will be worn once and then put in the back of a closet, monks work because it is what is right.

For most humans, throughout history, this is a truly alien concept, but it is a human concept that has been embraced voluntarily by millions of people over thousands of years.

So about capitalism and socialism? We need to view the debate about reaching the ultimate goal of post economics. Which system will bring more people to eliminating selfishness within themselves? Which system will bring about the desire to glorify God and serve our fellow man? It is a decision that cannot be forced upon anyone. Coercion won't lead anyone beyond economics. Right off the bat we can eliminate European socialism, which is cultural Marxism or social justice warriorism or whatever you want to call it. That's the exact opposite of morality and enlightenment. Soviet socialism is a lot closer to post economics, but it is also entirely authoritarian and centrally planned, so there's that whole issue of coercion. The bad form of capitalism, that I call crapitalism, with billionaire CEOs who run AIG into the ground and get golden parachutes, and celebrities making obscene amounts of money and buying fleets of Maybachs and chopping down a whole acre of mahogany to put in the mansion you never live in, or that allows Apple or KFC to carve their logo on the Moon because "They paid for it," that's pure selfishness, so that's no good either. There has to be something, a healthy, gradual system that will take us to post economics eventually, but we'll never figure it out if we're arguing about economic systems as the end and not the means.

I suspect that that system lies somewhere in a much smaller state, with more freedoms, where like-minded people come together to achieve a common goal. Big huge states of tens or hundreds of millions of people must be broken up into much smaller poleis, because if there is one thing that kills compassion and breeds selfishness and indifference, it is large agglomerations of people. The brain can only associate with so many people, and only so many groups of people can associate with one another before groups of total strangers no one cares about start appearing. Plato said that 5,000 was the ideal number of people for a city-state, and research from modern neuroscience and sociology tells us he was right. Now, that's not a first step, but it is an intermediary goal to work toward. The first step, I would say, would be reducing the size of government, because the present system is not only unsustainable, it was known to be unsustainable 80 years ago. Now it is rapidly collapsing. We must begin to act, and we must keep the ultimate goal of the post economic system in mind when we act so we know which direction to go.