Americans harbor fantastical racism toward Russians. The easy answer might be to say it is a hold over from the Cold War, but the hatred runs far deeper than that.
It is true that Americans hated Russians during the Cold War, and Russians thought it was because of communism. However, after the Soviet Union collapsed, Americans still hated Russians. Americans hate Russians not because of communism, but because Russians are Russians.
The trouble goes back all the way to the beginning of the Russian state. Russia was always the other, never quite Europe, but not Asia. After four centuries of harassment and repression at the hands of the Turks, the powerful Russian empire stood poised to obliterate the Ottoman empire and deal the Turks reprisal for enslaving half of Europe. The great powers should have cheered Russia on and provided aid and moral support. Instead France and Britain, enemies for a thousand years, joined forces and helped the Turks defeat the Russians in the Crimean War.
Britain and France saw in the Ottoman empire a puppet, where as in Russia they saw a rival. Vast beyond all imagining, with a bottomless supply of resources and manpower, Russia could swallow up the world if given half a chance. It's better to stick to the devil you know than these sub-human sons of Vikings.
America, as heir to the West, inherited hatred of Russia along with British common law and the English language.
Russia is an upstart. They are not an Ancien Régime like Britain or France or even Germany, who, through intermarriage, managed to take control of all the ruling houses of Europe without firing a shot. We can always pretend Germany, or the Holy Roman Empire, is successor to Rome, even though no such entity existed until 1871.
The Russians, on the other hand, they just appeared in the sixteenth century. They are also Orthodox Christians, not good Protestants like the British or Germans. Even the French Catholics with their Vatican voodoo are better than the crazy beards and fur caps of the mad Russian monks.
And Russians were not true full-blooded Europeans, they were Slavic untermensch. They weren't animals like Africans or Asians, they were more sophisticated, more sinister. They were like Neanderthals, animals that masqueraded as men. But the veneer of civilisation was never thick enough to convince the inbred cliques of Western Europe that Slavs were fully human like themselves.
That hatred, along with the insatiable bloodlust of the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, is fueling a Cold War 2 and threatening to tear apart any detente that President Trump hopes to build with Russia.
The Cold War was fueled by the bottomless desire for money and influence. Where once Uncle Joe Stalin had provided the bulk of the effort to stop the Nazis, with Roosevelt and Churchill happily smoking away with the Supreme Soviet, the end of the war had posed an existential threat to the nascent deep state. Without arms contracts the endless supply of money would dry up. With no enemy to spy on the intelligence apparatchiks would have to take jobs selling carpets or working in a delicatessen. No, they needed to concoct a new war so the party would never stop, and they fell back on the easiest target: Russia.
The military-industrial-intelligence complex, of both super powers, had to get rid of Kennedy and Khrushchev because they faced off eye to eye and found common ground and then turned inward to repair their broken countries. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the missiles were removed from Cuba and Turkey and almost 20 years of hostilities between the USA and USSR began to cool, Kennedy tried to restrain the power of the CIA and the private Federal Reserve, and Khrushchev tried to take resources away from the KGB and the arms manufacturers to improve the welfare of the Soviet citizens. Naturally they had to be removed and two war hawks, LBJ and Brezhnev, put in power.
Militarism, not communism, destroyed the USSR, and it very nearly destroyed the USA. USA just had a head start in terms of money it could lose, having avoided a disastrous civil war and destruction of 20% of its industry in WWII. If both countries started off on an even playing field both would have collapsed around the same time.
Of course the USSR couldn't compete. 3 million dead in WWI, another 4-5 million wounded. Loss of most of Russia's agricultural land. 6 years of civil war, another 3 million dead, at least. 7 million dead in famines in 1921-22, another 5-10 million dead in famine in 1932-33. At least 20-26 million dead in WWII, plus the destruction of at least 20% of all Soviet industry and agricultural land.
The Cold War was like a heavyweight champion fighting against some guy with both legs and an arm tied behind his back, and still, despite all that, in a single lifetime, people in the Soviet Union started basically as slaves living off the land making nothing to ending up making half of what people in America were making in 1991.
Imagine what could have happened if Kennedy and Khrushchev were allowed to make peace instead of being eliminated and having pointless war continue.
Imagine now what a glorious future we can live in if Trump and Putin are able to bring our two nations together. One unified force to eliminate Islamic terrorism, one unified force to chart a path to Mars and the outer moons. American technical know-how combined with the ironclad faith of the Russian Orthodox Church can restore Western civilisation to the glory it once was before materialism, atheism, cultural relativism, and moral nihilism began to eat away at the very heart of the greatest civilisation in human history.
I've spoken on this topic at length. The emptiness that has taken root in the West is the driving force behind Islamic terrorism. Lack of religion in the West, lack of value and meaning to life, is creating a vacuum, both spiritual and physical. Westerners are refusing to breed, so to solve the problem of a rapidly declining population, Angela Merkin, like a reverse Hitler, is flooding Europe with Islamic third-worlders. With no strong Christianity within Europe, there is nothing to stop those migrants from forming rape gangs and burning Sweden to the ground. Merkin is committing genocide against the German people.
The only thing that can keep the West from falling to pieces is strong Christian faith and a desire to breed, providing both the spiritual and physical bulwark against the endless hordes of Islamic migrants who believe women are property, rape is acceptable, homosexuals should be murdered, and all knowledge should be burned except for a single, all-encompassing book that can be interpreted six ways till Sunday by every back alley cleric and self-proclaimed Caliph.
And the only place where Christianity still reigns in Europe is Mother Russia.
We've watched as secular states in the Middle East and north Africa have been decapitated: Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan (the pro-Soviet government the United States destroyed by creating Al Qaeda). Egypt was nearly destroyed, and by every indication it appears that Erdogan of Turkey is an Islamist. The United States has its sights on Syria and Iran, two of Russia's allies. They should be our allies too, in the war against radical Islam. You see, even though the people there are overwhelmingly Muslim, they are ruled by rational actors who fully embrace technology and the twentieth century. Iran provided the US with support in eliminating the Taliban after 9/11. That's not because they are pro-America, Tehran just didn't want radical Islamists at their doorstep. There is also a horrendous heroin problem in Iran, fueled by the vast fields of opium poppies that grow from one horizon to the other in Afghanistan. Just as Britain and America sided with Stalin in World War Two, Iran sided with America against the Taliban because they shared a common enemy.
The United States went to war in Afghanistan out of revenge. Iran did so because they don't want mad, seventh century barbarians right next door poisoning and murdering their people.
Secular dictatorships in the Middle East are necessary to keep radical Islam from spreading, just as strong adherence to Christianity is necessary in Europe for the same reason. There were no refugees when Gaddafi was in power. He provided his people with free housing, food, water, and jobs, all paid for by the ocean of oil Libya sits atop, and he provided security by eliminating any Islamist barbarian who tried to stir up discord. The same is true with Assad in Syria.
If you sow the wind you will reap the whirlwind. If the United States works with Russia, Syria, and Iran to defeat radical Islam, everyone's lives will improve. There will be no need for anyone to migrate to Europe because Syria and Iraq themselves will be safe once again. Everyone wins except the arms manufacturers and the intelligence agencies.
That is why it is imperative that Trump is able to defeat the chickenhawks in Washington. That is why US troops need to be pulled out of Poland and the Baltic states, why the people of Crimea be permitted to stay in Russia where they voted to be. If the West is to survive, if world peace is truly to be realised, there must be an alliance between the US and Russia. If not then the West is destined to be reduced to dust in the wind.
Thursday, February 23, 2017
The Cult of Darwin
Evolution is why I originally went to school, specifically to study human evolution. That lasted about a year before I realised that it was simultaneously boring and a cult. It's not occult, it is a cult. It is a materialist quasi-religion with very little evidence. Occasionally you will find a transitional form here or there, but you need about 50,000 transitions between species and maybe you find 2 or 3, which doesn't really prove anything.
Evolution is based on the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. Because fossil B looks similar to fossil A and appears in later strata that means species B evolved from species A.
There's no way logically to draw that conclusion. Just because B appears after A does not mean A is the cause of B.
First of all, with fossils we're basing phylogeny on morphology. That's wrong. You can't do that. If you were to try that with living organisms you would get nonsense. A hippopotamus looks a lot like a pig, but genetically they're nothing alike. Ants and termites are both eusocial insects that live underground, but genetically they're nothing alike. Birds and bats both have similar skeletal structures that are necessary for flight, but genetically they're nothing alike. You can't base phylogeny on morphology because it doesn't work. Phylogeny needs to be based on genetics if on anything.
And yet all fossils are organised based on morphology even though that technique fails when it is tried on living species. Fossils themselves provide no evidence other than the sudden appearance and disappearance of certain species.
At the same time, every experiment that has ever been conducted to test evolution has also failed.
40,000 years of selective breeding has not turned dogs into a separate species. Dogs can still breed with wolves, and can still breed with coyotes and other canines. That makes them the same species, doesn't it? (That's a separate side issue: we don't even know what a species is.) Furthermore, as Tom Bethell points out in the video below, all these different dog breeds are allowed to mate in the wild and the offspring, over just a couple generations, return to the same morphology of the wild dog. 40,000 years of being separate from wolves and when returned to the wild dogs will revert back to wolves in a couple of generations. Nothing has changed except gossamer cosmetic features.
Another example is Richard Lenski's E. coli. 80,000 generations and nothing has changed. The longest laboratory experiment in evolution ever conducted and nothing has changed but cosmetics. The bacteria are plumper, because they are kept in a hypertonic solution, but if released into the wild they immediately return to their normal shape, and the rate of expression of a single pre-existing gene has increased, allowing for the digestion of citrate. That gene already existed, it was just turned off, and now it's turned on because the bacteria are placed in an environment that has a high concentration of citrate. In 80,000 generations nothing has happened.
And yet we are supposed to believe that in 80,000 generations humans went from Australopithecus to us. It's impossible. You couldn't do it in 8 million generations.
And that's just with natural selection (which, as Karl Popper correctly pointed out, isn't testable and is not a scientific theory). Abiogenesis is a whole other Pandora's can of worms unto itself.
Estimates place the odds of all the correct chemical reactions taking place, forming all the right amino acids, assembling into the right proteins, all in the correct sequence to form the first cell at 1:10^80. Anything beyond 1:10^50 is statistically impossible. It would require more time than the entire expected lifespan of the universe. Deep time is deep, but it's not bottomless. The ONLY recourse to this problem is the multiverse. There needs to be a minimum of 10^500 random parallel universes in order for our one to have life. That's metaphysics; that's religion, not science. It's impossible, even in theory, to verify the existence of these other universes.
Neodarwinism is not science, it's a materialistic religion based on multiple unfalsifiable assumptions. It polices speech and behaviour like any religion, it has dogma like any religion, it's deeply in bed with government like a religion, and it gets tithes (government grants) like a religion. It has a holy book, a prophet, and it has worship service (new atheist revival meetings and undergraduate courses). It absolves its believers of guilt (if you're just an animal and when you die you rot you can justify literally anything and need feel bad about nothing), and it provides believers with a sense of belonging to a community.
Evolution is a religion.
And that's why I quit. I wanted the truth, I didn't want to replace one set of beliefs for another.
At the same time I think it's important to state that I have no alternative. I'm not a supporter of any alternative hypothesis. I don't believe God created all the species all at once, I don't believe ancient aliens visited the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs so they could create humans to mine gold, I don't believe backward causation from some future omega point is pulling life toward an ultimate goal, and that's kind of it, those are really the three hypotheses that people have put forth over the centuries. Within the fossil record some species just appear at one time and die out at another, and we have absolutely no idea why. Within our own experience in the field we find species going extinct (often because we extinct them), and we find new species, but those species were just in inaccessible places, we've never observed a new species evolve.
The only honest, philosophically defensible position, I think, is agnosticism. Species appear and disappear and we have absolutely no clue as to why. Any other position is metaphysics, not science.
Evolution is based on the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. Because fossil B looks similar to fossil A and appears in later strata that means species B evolved from species A.
There's no way logically to draw that conclusion. Just because B appears after A does not mean A is the cause of B.
First of all, with fossils we're basing phylogeny on morphology. That's wrong. You can't do that. If you were to try that with living organisms you would get nonsense. A hippopotamus looks a lot like a pig, but genetically they're nothing alike. Ants and termites are both eusocial insects that live underground, but genetically they're nothing alike. Birds and bats both have similar skeletal structures that are necessary for flight, but genetically they're nothing alike. You can't base phylogeny on morphology because it doesn't work. Phylogeny needs to be based on genetics if on anything.
And yet all fossils are organised based on morphology even though that technique fails when it is tried on living species. Fossils themselves provide no evidence other than the sudden appearance and disappearance of certain species.
At the same time, every experiment that has ever been conducted to test evolution has also failed.
40,000 years of selective breeding has not turned dogs into a separate species. Dogs can still breed with wolves, and can still breed with coyotes and other canines. That makes them the same species, doesn't it? (That's a separate side issue: we don't even know what a species is.) Furthermore, as Tom Bethell points out in the video below, all these different dog breeds are allowed to mate in the wild and the offspring, over just a couple generations, return to the same morphology of the wild dog. 40,000 years of being separate from wolves and when returned to the wild dogs will revert back to wolves in a couple of generations. Nothing has changed except gossamer cosmetic features.
Another example is Richard Lenski's E. coli. 80,000 generations and nothing has changed. The longest laboratory experiment in evolution ever conducted and nothing has changed but cosmetics. The bacteria are plumper, because they are kept in a hypertonic solution, but if released into the wild they immediately return to their normal shape, and the rate of expression of a single pre-existing gene has increased, allowing for the digestion of citrate. That gene already existed, it was just turned off, and now it's turned on because the bacteria are placed in an environment that has a high concentration of citrate. In 80,000 generations nothing has happened.
And yet we are supposed to believe that in 80,000 generations humans went from Australopithecus to us. It's impossible. You couldn't do it in 8 million generations.
And that's just with natural selection (which, as Karl Popper correctly pointed out, isn't testable and is not a scientific theory). Abiogenesis is a whole other Pandora's can of worms unto itself.
Estimates place the odds of all the correct chemical reactions taking place, forming all the right amino acids, assembling into the right proteins, all in the correct sequence to form the first cell at 1:10^80. Anything beyond 1:10^50 is statistically impossible. It would require more time than the entire expected lifespan of the universe. Deep time is deep, but it's not bottomless. The ONLY recourse to this problem is the multiverse. There needs to be a minimum of 10^500 random parallel universes in order for our one to have life. That's metaphysics; that's religion, not science. It's impossible, even in theory, to verify the existence of these other universes.
Neodarwinism is not science, it's a materialistic religion based on multiple unfalsifiable assumptions. It polices speech and behaviour like any religion, it has dogma like any religion, it's deeply in bed with government like a religion, and it gets tithes (government grants) like a religion. It has a holy book, a prophet, and it has worship service (new atheist revival meetings and undergraduate courses). It absolves its believers of guilt (if you're just an animal and when you die you rot you can justify literally anything and need feel bad about nothing), and it provides believers with a sense of belonging to a community.
Evolution is a religion.
And that's why I quit. I wanted the truth, I didn't want to replace one set of beliefs for another.
At the same time I think it's important to state that I have no alternative. I'm not a supporter of any alternative hypothesis. I don't believe God created all the species all at once, I don't believe ancient aliens visited the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs so they could create humans to mine gold, I don't believe backward causation from some future omega point is pulling life toward an ultimate goal, and that's kind of it, those are really the three hypotheses that people have put forth over the centuries. Within the fossil record some species just appear at one time and die out at another, and we have absolutely no idea why. Within our own experience in the field we find species going extinct (often because we extinct them), and we find new species, but those species were just in inaccessible places, we've never observed a new species evolve.
The only honest, philosophically defensible position, I think, is agnosticism. Species appear and disappear and we have absolutely no clue as to why. Any other position is metaphysics, not science.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Forgiveness
Richard Smoley, from the last video, looks at the topic of radical forgiveness. Forgiveness is a key topic within Christianity, and it is the practice at the heart of A Course in Miracles. The idea behind forgiveness is that one does it for one's self. You don't forgive the other person to give the other person something, you forgive the other person because you have created an image of the other person in your mind that is eating away at your peace. To cure your own distress you must cure that mental impression.
At the same time forgiveness does not mean to become a doormat. Remember, Jesus overturned the tables at the temple and he whipped the money changers. Jesus instructed his followers to "Sell your cloak to buy a sword." You shouldn't leave yourself defenseless, nor should you let someone off the hook who is abusing you. We are instructed multiple times to avoid toxic people.
At the same time forgiveness does not mean to become a doormat. Remember, Jesus overturned the tables at the temple and he whipped the money changers. Jesus instructed his followers to "Sell your cloak to buy a sword." You shouldn't leave yourself defenseless, nor should you let someone off the hook who is abusing you. We are instructed multiple times to avoid toxic people.
Friday, February 17, 2017
Top 10 of 2016
2016 was the biggest year for The Urban Mystic since it was started in 2006. The three months that saw the heaviest traffic were October, November, and December of 2016. Last month had 22% more visitors than the next busiest month, October.
There is no mystery about what the biggest draw of traffic was: the election. So much, in fact, that if I break the election down into three categories - general election, Donald Trump, and Hitlery Clinton - they will take the three top spots. For that reason, I'm counting the election separately, and including three additional topics that drew in considerable traffic.
Election Special
1. Hitlery Roddamn Clinton
The most corrupt person, and the first and only felon, to run for President of These United States, easily tops the list. With at least 38 individual posts there's no question that, for at least a good, solid month, The Urban Mystic was almost entirely devoted to detailing the evil and corruption of Secretary Clinton. And I only touched about 1/3 of the stack of stories I wanted to cover. Had I done more then stories would be pushed off the front page after fewer than the 24 hour minimum I set. I never imagined that self-imposed restriction would ever be challenged! There got to a point where I was suffering from corruption fatigue. Clinton had just done so much evil that there was no way to keep track of it all and her plethora of misdeeds just started to blend into the background and get filtered out.
2. The Election in General
Everything not directly related to Trump or Clinton. Including John Podesta, Project Veritas, Anthony Weiner, the RNC, and big name "conservatives" braying about "Muh Principles!" Including the very long thesis "What is at Stake in the Next Election", which would have made the top 10 on its own.
3. Donald Trump
The God Emperor himself! The entire election was not negative, also detailed were the numerous good qualities of my main man Trump. During the campaign Trump outlined many policies that set him apart from every other candidate who has run in the past 5 decades, including supporting national security, opposing the globalists in NATO, the UN, and big business, and wanting to give parents more control over their children's education. Sure, people like Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and Bernie Sanders have said a bunch of the same things, but none of them had the strategic genius to pull in $2 billion in free advertisement from the MSM. None of them spoke the language of the common American. Good ideas are good, but when coupled with academic language those ideas are lost on the average person. Trump's great strength is his ability to communicate complex ideas in a simple manner.
The Other Top Ten
1. The Global Warming Hoax
We all know that
2. World War Three with Russia
Maobama and the globalists are hellbent on destroying humanity in a nuclear war with Russia.
NATO is obsolete. It is a Cold War relic whose purpose has long since expired. NATO bases have slowly encroached on Russian territory over the past two decades in an attempt to provoke the bear into a suicidal nuclear war and create a unipolar world in which their power can never be challenged.
Europe was, and in a way still is, on the brink of war with Russia. NATO troops have flooded Poland and the Baltic states in a direct act of aggression. US nukes have been placed in Romania.
We really dodged a nuclear bullet when Hitlery Roddamn Clinton, the most corrupt person who has ever and will ever live, lost the election. Not only wanted to go to war with Russia, she promised to go to war with Russia if she was elected (and Iran too).
3. Cults: Veganism
4. Survival After Death
This is what started The Urban Mystic eleven long years ago. A number of luminaries within the field have discussed the finer points of spirit mediumship, the science of possession, the potential link between the mind and quantum functions within the brain, and the philosophical issues one needs to tackle to understand just what survival of consciousness entails.
5. Reincarnation
Reincarnation is one of those topics that is extremely misunderstood. One commonly held myth is that reincarnation was an integral part of early Christianity that was eliminated by Emperor Constantine or Justinian or someone else in some great ecumenical council for some nefarious purpose. That never happened. There have been rather tame debates about the pre-existence of the soul, but no evidence that I've seen indicates a wide-spread belief in reincarnation.
There are a plethora of questions that are raised by the very idea, and any potential mechanisms involved, in the process of reincarnation. A lot of spiritualists (people who follow the pronouncements of spirit mediums, not people who are "spiritual but not religious") seem to dislike the idea of reincarnation, or else concoct mysterious entities such as group souls and over souls that are the same and different from the individual soul at the same time to get past the idea of having to come back in person.
6. Turkey's Dissintegration
A failed coup attempt threw Turkey into turmoil and revealed President Erdogan as an Ottomanist and an Islamist who is viciously opposed by elements within the secular military that Ataturk tried to set up in 1923.
To make matters worse, Turkey has gone on a warpath, stopping at nothing to drag Russia into nuclear war with NATO by invading Syria and murdering a Russian ambassador.
7. The Day the Earth Stood Still
In 1951 a brilliant, well thought out science fiction movie was made about an alien that came to Earth in the wake of humans developing rockets and nuclear weapons. Together these technologies posed a direct threat to the alien civilisation. The alien told the world that if humans want to stay on the Earth they could do whatever they want, but if humans want to continue exploring space then they would have to abandon warfare and abide by the rules of the galactic federation. It made absolute complete total perfect sense.
In 2008 an all-star piece of CGI garbage was thrown together and the title The Day the Earth Stood Still was tacked on for good measure. Apparently humans are destroying the Earth, and since planets that support life are so astronomically rare aliens arrive to unleash a super weapon to wipe the entire surface of the Earth clean and re-seed the now barren planet with zoo animals, or something. Literally nothing about this movie makes any sense, and every single problem could have been solved in the first five minutes by giving humans non-polluting free energy technology. The only conclusion I could come up with as to why the aliens chose not to do so is because they are colonists who want to use the Earth for their own purposes and are cloaking their plan to exterminate humans under moral sounding language.
8. Antonin Scalia's Mysterious Death
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the strongest opponent to the communist takeover of the US government on the court, died allegedly from a heart attack. His body was discovered with a pillow over his face. And the whole ordeal with the government and fake news was suspicious as hell.
Since there were allegedly "no signs of foul play" Presidio County Judge Cinderella Guevara declined to order an autopsy. The Scalia family also refused to have an autopsy conducted. The justice's body was rushed to a funeral home and embalmed post haste as if to destroy any evidence.
Maybe he did die of a heart attack, maybe the family has some religious custom or something where the body has to be buried within 24 hours, maybe there really is nothing to see here, but it is very suspicious that the most incorruptible Supreme Court justice dies with a pillow over his face and immediately everyone goes into damage control mode to say there was no foul play and to dispose of the body.
9. The Great War Counterfactual
The First World War was a total disaster and a waste of life caused by warmongering Austrians who wanted to absorb Serbia to prove that the sun had not set on their empire. However, the scope and scale of the war could have been mitigated had Britain remained neutral, and it could have been avoided entirely had Russia not leapt to the defense of Serbia in August 1914. The Austrian army was well past its prime, and it was dealt a crushing defeat in 1914 at the hands of little Serbia. Had Russia not dragged Germany, with its bottomless reserves of highly skilled men, into the war, Austria would have limped home with its tail between its legs and 20 million lives could have been spared.
10. The Miracle of the Holy Blood
Saint Januarius' blood failed to liquify as it is supposed to do every year. For over a thousand years this yearly miracle has failed only a handful of times, coinciding with a terrible disaster every single time. Fake skeptics don't have a leg to stand on. Even if the blood is a hoax, like they say, it's a hoax that has a track record of predicting the future with 100% accuracy. Either it's a genuine miracle or some psychic precognition is involved on the part of the hoaxers, so either way the skep-dicks lose. What's in store for this year for Naples, we'll see.
Honourable Mention
The Trouble with Modern Spirituality
People who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" are most often the least spiritual, most materialistic, most hedonistic, most narcissistic, least compassionate, least charitable, least philosophical people on the planet. At the same time their nihilism and relativism is the main driving force behind the spread Islamic terrorism.
There is no mystery about what the biggest draw of traffic was: the election. So much, in fact, that if I break the election down into three categories - general election, Donald Trump, and Hitlery Clinton - they will take the three top spots. For that reason, I'm counting the election separately, and including three additional topics that drew in considerable traffic.
Election Special
1. Hitlery Roddamn Clinton
The most corrupt person, and the first and only felon, to run for President of These United States, easily tops the list. With at least 38 individual posts there's no question that, for at least a good, solid month, The Urban Mystic was almost entirely devoted to detailing the evil and corruption of Secretary Clinton. And I only touched about 1/3 of the stack of stories I wanted to cover. Had I done more then stories would be pushed off the front page after fewer than the 24 hour minimum I set. I never imagined that self-imposed restriction would ever be challenged! There got to a point where I was suffering from corruption fatigue. Clinton had just done so much evil that there was no way to keep track of it all and her plethora of misdeeds just started to blend into the background and get filtered out.
2. The Election in General
Everything not directly related to Trump or Clinton. Including John Podesta, Project Veritas, Anthony Weiner, the RNC, and big name "conservatives" braying about "Muh Principles!" Including the very long thesis "What is at Stake in the Next Election", which would have made the top 10 on its own.
3. Donald Trump
The God Emperor himself! The entire election was not negative, also detailed were the numerous good qualities of my main man Trump. During the campaign Trump outlined many policies that set him apart from every other candidate who has run in the past 5 decades, including supporting national security, opposing the globalists in NATO, the UN, and big business, and wanting to give parents more control over their children's education. Sure, people like Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, and Bernie Sanders have said a bunch of the same things, but none of them had the strategic genius to pull in $2 billion in free advertisement from the MSM. None of them spoke the language of the common American. Good ideas are good, but when coupled with academic language those ideas are lost on the average person. Trump's great strength is his ability to communicate complex ideas in a simple manner.
The Other Top Ten
1. The Global Warming Hoax
We all know that
g̶l̶o̶b̶a̶l̶ ̶w̶a̶r̶m̶i̶n̶g̶c̶l̶i̶m̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ climate disruption is the biggest crock of shit that's ever been conceived. We saw freezing temperatures turn the Sahara white for Christmas. Global warming, under whatever guise it manifests under, is the biggest scam in the history of the world. Trillions of dollars stand to be made or lost by researchers, governments, and fake green energy companies. Increased CO2 not only is not causing warming, it is leading to a greening of the planet by promoting plant growth. That's very important to remember, CO2 is plant food, and measures to cut CO2 output, or to scrub it from the atmosphere, will lead to global devastation. Plants had previously been starving for CO2, and it is only due to human activity that atmospheric concentrations have begun to increase to normal levels again.2. World War Three with Russia
Maobama and the globalists are hellbent on destroying humanity in a nuclear war with Russia.
NATO is obsolete. It is a Cold War relic whose purpose has long since expired. NATO bases have slowly encroached on Russian territory over the past two decades in an attempt to provoke the bear into a suicidal nuclear war and create a unipolar world in which their power can never be challenged.
Europe was, and in a way still is, on the brink of war with Russia. NATO troops have flooded Poland and the Baltic states in a direct act of aggression. US nukes have been placed in Romania.
We really dodged a nuclear bullet when Hitlery Roddamn Clinton, the most corrupt person who has ever and will ever live, lost the election. Not only wanted to go to war with Russia, she promised to go to war with Russia if she was elected (and Iran too).
3. Cults: Veganism
G̶l̶o̶b̶a̶l̶ ̶w̶a̶r̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ c̶l̶i̶m̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ climate disruption might be totally fake, but one thing humans really are doing that's destroying the environment is turning vegan. 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. 4. Survival After Death
This is what started The Urban Mystic eleven long years ago. A number of luminaries within the field have discussed the finer points of spirit mediumship, the science of possession, the potential link between the mind and quantum functions within the brain, and the philosophical issues one needs to tackle to understand just what survival of consciousness entails.
5. Reincarnation
Reincarnation is one of those topics that is extremely misunderstood. One commonly held myth is that reincarnation was an integral part of early Christianity that was eliminated by Emperor Constantine or Justinian or someone else in some great ecumenical council for some nefarious purpose. That never happened. There have been rather tame debates about the pre-existence of the soul, but no evidence that I've seen indicates a wide-spread belief in reincarnation.
There are a plethora of questions that are raised by the very idea, and any potential mechanisms involved, in the process of reincarnation. A lot of spiritualists (people who follow the pronouncements of spirit mediums, not people who are "spiritual but not religious") seem to dislike the idea of reincarnation, or else concoct mysterious entities such as group souls and over souls that are the same and different from the individual soul at the same time to get past the idea of having to come back in person.
6. Turkey's Dissintegration
A failed coup attempt threw Turkey into turmoil and revealed President Erdogan as an Ottomanist and an Islamist who is viciously opposed by elements within the secular military that Ataturk tried to set up in 1923.
To make matters worse, Turkey has gone on a warpath, stopping at nothing to drag Russia into nuclear war with NATO by invading Syria and murdering a Russian ambassador.
7. The Day the Earth Stood Still
In 1951 a brilliant, well thought out science fiction movie was made about an alien that came to Earth in the wake of humans developing rockets and nuclear weapons. Together these technologies posed a direct threat to the alien civilisation. The alien told the world that if humans want to stay on the Earth they could do whatever they want, but if humans want to continue exploring space then they would have to abandon warfare and abide by the rules of the galactic federation. It made absolute complete total perfect sense.
In 2008 an all-star piece of CGI garbage was thrown together and the title The Day the Earth Stood Still was tacked on for good measure. Apparently humans are destroying the Earth, and since planets that support life are so astronomically rare aliens arrive to unleash a super weapon to wipe the entire surface of the Earth clean and re-seed the now barren planet with zoo animals, or something. Literally nothing about this movie makes any sense, and every single problem could have been solved in the first five minutes by giving humans non-polluting free energy technology. The only conclusion I could come up with as to why the aliens chose not to do so is because they are colonists who want to use the Earth for their own purposes and are cloaking their plan to exterminate humans under moral sounding language.
8. Antonin Scalia's Mysterious Death
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the strongest opponent to the communist takeover of the US government on the court, died allegedly from a heart attack. His body was discovered with a pillow over his face. And the whole ordeal with the government and fake news was suspicious as hell.
Since there were allegedly "no signs of foul play" Presidio County Judge Cinderella Guevara declined to order an autopsy. The Scalia family also refused to have an autopsy conducted. The justice's body was rushed to a funeral home and embalmed post haste as if to destroy any evidence.
Maybe he did die of a heart attack, maybe the family has some religious custom or something where the body has to be buried within 24 hours, maybe there really is nothing to see here, but it is very suspicious that the most incorruptible Supreme Court justice dies with a pillow over his face and immediately everyone goes into damage control mode to say there was no foul play and to dispose of the body.
9. The Great War Counterfactual
The First World War was a total disaster and a waste of life caused by warmongering Austrians who wanted to absorb Serbia to prove that the sun had not set on their empire. However, the scope and scale of the war could have been mitigated had Britain remained neutral, and it could have been avoided entirely had Russia not leapt to the defense of Serbia in August 1914. The Austrian army was well past its prime, and it was dealt a crushing defeat in 1914 at the hands of little Serbia. Had Russia not dragged Germany, with its bottomless reserves of highly skilled men, into the war, Austria would have limped home with its tail between its legs and 20 million lives could have been spared.
10. The Miracle of the Holy Blood
Saint Januarius' blood failed to liquify as it is supposed to do every year. For over a thousand years this yearly miracle has failed only a handful of times, coinciding with a terrible disaster every single time. Fake skeptics don't have a leg to stand on. Even if the blood is a hoax, like they say, it's a hoax that has a track record of predicting the future with 100% accuracy. Either it's a genuine miracle or some psychic precognition is involved on the part of the hoaxers, so either way the skep-dicks lose. What's in store for this year for Naples, we'll see.
Honourable Mention
The Trouble with Modern Spirituality
People who describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious" are most often the least spiritual, most materialistic, most hedonistic, most narcissistic, least compassionate, least charitable, least philosophical people on the planet. At the same time their nihilism and relativism is the main driving force behind the spread Islamic terrorism.
Tuesday, February 14, 2017
The Supernatural with Richard Smoley
Fabulous talk from Thinking Allowed. Easily one of the best of the series.
Richard Smoley is editor of Quest: The Journal of the Theosophical
Society in America. He is also former editor of Gnosis Magazine. His
books include Hidden Wisdom: The Guide to the Western Inner Traditions,
Inner Christianity: The Guide to the Esoteric Tradition, Forbidden
Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism, The Essential Nostradamus,
Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity, The Dice Game of
Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe, The Supernatural:
Writings on an Unknown History, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and
Complete Forgiveness, and How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really
Saying About God and the Bible.
Here he notes that many of the
great spiritual teachers of the twentieth century (Blavatsky, Steiner,
Gurdjieff, Jung) had teachers who remain unknown. He suggests that this
reflects the desire of all these individuals to avoid the limelight of
public scrutiny. While describing most channeled material as “banal”, he
praises Jane Roberts’ Seth material as well as A Course in Miracles. He
reviews the history of Satanism and, paradoxically, associates it with
the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. He also comments on the writings
of Aleister Crowley as well as tantra.
Richard Smoley is editor of Quest: The Journal of the Theosophical
Society in America. He is also former editor of Gnosis Magazine. His
books include Hidden Wisdom: The Guide to the Western Inner Traditions,
Inner Christianity: The Guide to the Esoteric Tradition, Forbidden
Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism, The Essential Nostradamus,
Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity, The Dice Game of
Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe, The Supernatural:
Writings on an Unknown History, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and
Complete Forgiveness, and How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really
Saying About God and the Bible.
Here he notes that many of the
great spiritual teachers of the twentieth century (Blavatsky, Steiner,
Gurdjieff, Jung) had teachers who remain unknown. He suggests that this
reflects the desire of all these individuals to avoid the limelight of
public scrutiny. While describing most channeled material as “banal”, he
praises Jane Roberts’ Seth material as well as A Course in Miracles. He
reviews the history of Satanism and, paradoxically, associates it with
the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. He also comments on the writings
of Aleister Crowley as well as tantra.
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