The Urban Mystic

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ

2012-02-06T21:12:00.001-05:00

I write to you concerning an alarming and serious matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly, and that strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith. The federal government, which claims to be “of, by, and for the people,” has just been dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people — the Catholic population — and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees’ health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.

In so ruling, the Obama Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to either violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so). The Obama Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.

We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.

And therefore, I would ask of you two things. First, as a community of faith we must commit ourselves to prayer and fasting that wisdom and justice may prevail, and religious liberty may be restored. Without God, we can do nothing; with God, nothing is impossible. Second, I would also recommend visiting www.usccb.org/conscience,to learn more about this severe assault on religious liberty, and how to contact Congress in support of legislation that would reverse the Obama Administration’s decision.

The Story of Sathya Sai Baba

2012-02-05T04:27:00.000-05:00

A 9 minute video on the life of Sai Baba. There is no narration, you will need to read it.

A Question About The Quran

2012-02-01T23:38:00.004-05:00

I've studied the world's major religions for years but it was not until a couple days ago that the following question came to me. I was watching a documentary on H2 (previously History International) called "Secrets of the Koran" (1 hour 30 minutes), and aside from the fact that the illegible map they used and everything else was bathed in red hues making it difficult to see what was going on, and that it was a typical "hagiographic" documentary about Islam (I have yet to see a Western documentary on Islam that even has one person interviewed who is even willing to raise a single question regarding the orthodox Sunni position on the history of Islam and Muhammad), a couple of facts, or statements, piqued my curiosity. I'm sure I had heard all of these facts before but they never came together until the weekend.

For sake of argument, let us assume that the orthodox Sunni account is correct in all these facts (I have no objection to any of them). What is interesting is the possible interpretation that can be drawn.

1. Muhammad was illiterate. This is said to be one of the important facts concerning why the Quran is genuine revelation. It is argued that since Muhammad was illiterate he could not have copied stuff from other holy texts (or other texts in general, like all the medical knowledge from the Quran that was known by pagan doctors like Galen of Pergamon five centuries earlier). Okay, most people were illiterate back then (an even today) so it is no stretch of the imagination to suppose Muhammad was illiterate as well.

2. The text of the Quran was memorised perfectly by companions of Muhammad for around 30 years before it was compiled by Caliph Uthman (although the diacritical marks were added 50 or more years later, without which the Uthmanic text can be pronounced in a number of different ways, leading to different interpretations, because written Arabic, like Hebrew, has no vowels). Again, there's no problem here. People living in an oral culture are trained from a very early age to develop fantastic memories. Bramins in Kerala are trained to memorise the four Vedas twice, once as it is and once as one continuous sound. Poets memorised very long epic texts like the Illiad and Mahabarata.

Can you see what my question is yet? I'll give you a hint: Muhammad was a merchant before he became a prophet at age 40.

If we take as fact that Muhammad was an illiterate merchant and that people from his village (and certainly Muhammad himself, since he was the first person to memorise the text of the Quran!) were capable of fantastic feats of memory, how is fact number one proof again that the Quran is divine revelation? The Israelites, Greeks, and Romans travelled all over the western regions of the Arabian peninsula, and the Sassanid Persians controlled the east and south (present Yemen and Oman). Both cultures had advanced technological and scientific writings, and well developed and cosmopolitan religions (there were missionaries from many Christian and Gnostic sects as well as Jewish merchants and members of the Persian mystery religions). Arabia was bathed with knowledge, secular and religious. Muhammad would have encountered Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, Persian, and Greek religious and scientific ideas when he made his rounds trading salt or dates or whatever it was he made a living from. Since he, and many people, had very good memories, there is no reason to assume he could not have heard stories from Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and others and memorised them. Saying Muhammad was illiterate in no way demonstrates that the Quran is divine revelation.

If we look at the Quran we find a number of things: Greek medical and geological knowledge, Gnostic interpretations of Jesus (like that Jesus was not crucified, a look-alike was), "Reader's Digest" versions of stories about Abraham and other Jewish figures. It could be said that God revealed all this to Muhammad, I have no problem with that, but it means that evidence has to be brought up to cast doubt on the cryptomnesia hypothesis that Muhammad had heard all this stuff while he was a merchant, forgot about it, and then subconsciously reworked it together to form the Quran. Both scenarios are possible, and right now both have precisely the same amount of evidence.

As of now I do not have an answer to this question, nor do I forsee that I will at any time in the future. The most I can hope for is that more people will take this question to heart and ponder over it.

Alan Keyes on Marriage

2012-01-29T04:11:00.001-05:00

Alan Keyes explains the definition of marriage in principle.

Stuart Meets Kermit

2012-01-29T03:55:00.001-05:00

Stuart Davis interviews Kermit the Frog on Sex, God, Rock 'n Roll! They talk about movies, spirituality, and spawning. It's a really cool way to spend three and a half minutes.

Apparently there are some problems with HDnet, the site that hosts the show, and Integral Naked wants me to share some videos with you.

There's some pretty funny stuff that explores and exemplifies the side of spirituality that's above mere reverence, exploding out into the pure humour of duality that is the play of form and emptiness all over your Original Face. Check it out.

Charlie Sheen EPIC

2012-01-27T02:38:00.002-05:00

Charlie Sheen talks about what it's like to smoke seven grams of crack.

Charlie Sheen tells the secret of winning after talking about how pain is all in your mind.

Why "The Walking Dead" Can't Happen

2012-01-22T23:49:00.004-05:00

Let's get it out first that this will be dealing only with the television series, not the comic book. The comic book nicely avoids this problem all together by having everyone who dies for any reason except brain injury reanimate.

Aside from the first half of season two being about two episodes stretched out to seven and not getting anywhere for no apparent reason (money?), and the improbable aiming skills the characters have (try making a head-shot every single time while both you and your target are moving top speed - bet you can't!)*, and the glaring inconsistencies with how the zombies work**, the whole business of zombification would render the story completely impossible from the start.

In the TV series "The Walking Dead" the only way someone becomes a zombie is to be bitten by a zombie, escape, die, and then reanimate. It doesn't help to be bitten and then devoured because there's nothing left to reanimate. You have to kill the zombie (kill, they're already dead!) or run away, and then go croak somewhere because a zombie bite is always fatal. Then when you die you have to be far enough away from the zombies to not have your body eaten, because reanimation isn't instantaneous. Dr. Jenner stated that it takes a few minutes to a few hours before the brainstem starts up again, so if you're eaten within that window you won't zombify.

Anyone who dies but is not bitten will not zombify, as the mess of bodies in the traffic pile up attest to. This leads one to wonder if the process of zombification takes so long and requires a bite from a creature that certainly won't say "he's dead, I'll attack a living now and leave his body to zombify," you're going to have a hard time reaching plague proportions. Consider next the fighting abilities of humans and zombies. Zombie to human kills are at least eight to one. Anyone with a gun will kill as many zombies as they have bullets, guaranteed. Unless a minimum of eight zombies attacks any person, no matter how big or strong or fast or smart or well armed, that person will survive. When we combine these two problems there is absolutely no way we can have a global zombie pandemic with only a handful of humans left. The mathematics just doesn't work. If zombies are so damn difficult to make and so damn easy to kill there is absolutely no way to get a zombie apocalypse going. Maybe a couple towns will be caught off guard, but not an entire country, and certainly not the whole planet.

Don't say that maybe one zombie bit ten or twenty people before being put down. They don't do that. A zombie will keep attacking someone until they eat the person or are destroyed. They are not smart enough to sacrifice themselves by biting several people to spread the plague before being killed. Zombiism doesn't spread fast enough for a zombie to bite someone, have them turn, and then move on to someone new. Unless we eliminate one or both of the above facts - the dificulty of zombification or the kill disparity - there is no way "The Walking Dead" can happen. That's what you get when you try to have dead zombies who spread like living zombies.

*Andrea is the only one that has ever missed, and only because missing was relevant to advance the story, and she still very nearly killed Daryl (with a head shot, as if I needed to mention it) at 200+ yards, from an unsupported prone position, facing the sun, with an unknown number of head winds, with five friendlies just feet away from Daryl, on the second time she's ever fired a gun. Damn! Now that's beginner's luck! Her stupidity could easily have killed one or more of six people. Even if there was a zombie there's no way a thinking person would have attempted a shot like that.

**Sometimes they hunt by smell, other times they don't; sometimes loud sounds like gunfire will attract them, other times you can teach people how to shoot all afternoon and attract no attention at all; whatever reanimates them only restartes the brainstem but people can hit them anywhere in the head and still bring them down, going so far as to have Daryl shoot one with his crossbow up through the jaw and hard palate into the nasal cavity and kill it after it started gnawing on his boot even though the bolt would have only gone through the frontal lobes, which were explicitly stated to not restart with zombification.

DERPY!

2012-01-21T17:43:00.001-05:00

This is the day bronies have been waiting for since episode 1, Derpy is now an official character!

Balking Hawking Part 3: In The Beginning

2012-01-17T00:00:00.000-05:00

Ever since the idea of the Big Bang was conceived cosmologists who hated God looked for a way around creation. The universe couldn't have a beginning; it would ruin the perfect harmony of an eternal universe. No beginning, no need for an explanation, right? To celebrate Hawking's 70th birthday here is a third installment in the series on him, his cosmology, and his theology.

See Also Balking Hawking Part 1, Part 2, and Georg Cantor's Infinities Part 2.

From NewScientist:

"Many physicists have been fighting a rearguard action against [the Big Bang] for decades, largely because of its theological overtones. If you have an instant of creation, don't you need a creator?

Cosmologists thought they had a workaround. Over the years, they have tried on several different models of the universe that dodge the need for a beginning while still requiring a big bang. But recent research has shot them full of holes (see "Why physicists can't avoid a creation event"). It now seems certain that the universe did have a beginning."

Lawrence Krauss in his new book A Universe From Nothing tries to deal a knock-out blow to the deity by replacing one metaphysical system with another. God is given up for the multiverse, a cacophony of quantum randomness belching out universes like Our Idiot Brother.

It is in vogue now to redefine "nothing" to mean "the quantum vacuum that has always existed," but in an interview on Coast to Coast AM, Krauss does his fellow metaphysicists one better. He admitted that you don't even need a quantum vacuum or quantum laws, as NewScientist explains:

"However, the laws of physics can't be conjured from nothing. In the end, the best answer is that they arise from our existence within a multiverse, where all the universes have their own laws - ours being just so for no particular reason.

Krauss contends that the multiverse makes the question of what determined our laws of nature "less significant". Truthfully, it just puts the question beyond science - for now, at least. That (together with the frustratingly opaque origins of a multiverse) means Krauss can't quite knock out those who think there must ultimately be a prime mover. Not that this matters too much: the juvenile asides that litter the first third of the book (for example, "I am tempted to retort here that theologians are expert at nothing") mean that, by the time we get to the fascinating core of his argument, Krauss will be preaching only to the converted."
[emphasis mine]

The multiverse: the great unknown and unknowable. A meta-space that is beyond our space-time and thus forever beyond our ability to test it. Being untestable the multiverse must surrender its claim to the title "science" and accept that it is now, and forever, metaphysics. To do away with the idea of a creation, an absolute beginning of the universe, Krauss throws science away and invents an untestable story. Even the Bible contains historical details that can be tested, the multiverse is just "bullshit metaphysics".

Metaphysicists have tried to propose systems where the universe (or multiverse) is eternal into the past, but Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University has shot holes in all of them (even though he still believes in the multiverse, it had to have a beginning in the finite past).

Eternal inflation, the idea that the inflation that sped up the expansion of the early universe didnt' stop, it still continues in other regions of space beyond our cosmic horizon, spawning new bubble universes forever, was the first to go. Some thought inflation was eternal into the past too, but in 2003 Vilenkin and Alan Guth ran the calculations on Hubble's Constant and found that it doesn't work. Inflation may continue forever into the future, but it had to have a beginning in the past.

Next came the big bounce, the idea that after a long time, a trillion years or so, expansion slows and stops, eventually reversing until everything flys back into a single point called the Big Crunch. Then the shock of impact of everything on everything starts a new Big Bang, and the cycle continues forever. Unfortunately, disorder increases with time, so each new universe must be more disordered than the one that birthed it. If the cycle had been going on forever disorder would be infinite and the universe would be completely featureless. Since there's stuff in the universe the cycles couldn't have gone on forever. Some people then suggested that the universe just gets bigger with each bounce, so the disorder spreads out more so no one notices it (like in the M-Brane ekpyrotic model and possibly whatever the hell Penrose's new idea is - no one seems to understand his Aeons of time model, within the physics community or anywhere). But if the whole thing is getting bigger it had to start somewhere really really small, maximally small, and that means a finite beginning.

There's also an idea from the 1930s called the cosmic egg or primeval atom, where yes, there was a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, but the thing that banged was an uber-dense subatomic thing that existed forever until it got tired of existing as a tiny little particle and exploded. However, Vilenkin and a graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that quantum instability would have led to the egg's collapse after a finite time. The crack (the Big Bang) had to happen before the egg collapsed into oblivion so it couldn't have existed forever, even if it existed for a really, really long time before the Big Bang.

Vilenkin concludes[:] "All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."

V.J. Torley of UD comments on the implications of a universe requiring a beginning. He reasons (muses, really), in line with William Lane Craig, that the cause of the universe, which cannot be within the universe itself, must be personal. Scientific and mathematic laws are just descriptions of observations. They are not Platonic furniture of reality, and they are causally inert. Only a person, an agent, can bring about the creation of the universe, acting for some reason. The evidence from fine tuning (not only of the universe, but if you read Georg Cantor's Infinities Part 2 and other links provided in the UD article, you'll see that the multiverse too must be fine tuned) is suggestive of a highly mathematical and aesthetic mind behind the constants of the universe.

There you have it, a birthday present, albeit a very bad one, from Alexander Vilenkin to Stephen Hawking: a universe with a definite beginning in the finite past.

Pissgate, King of Bain, & Obama's Dirty Little Secret

2012-01-14T20:05:00.004-05:00

Pissgate

Remember the LiveLeak (very appropriate) video of four Marines pissing on dead Taliban? Here's the video in case you don't (contains real dead bodies):

Representative Allen West (a combat veteran) commented on the incident:

"I do not recall any self-righteous indignation when our Delta snipers Shugart and Gordon had their bodies dragged through Mogadishu. Neither do I recall media outrage and condemnation of our Blackwater security contractors being killed, their bodies burned, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah."

"The Marines were wrong. Give them a maximum punishment under field grade level Article 15 (non-judicial punishment)..."

"As for everyone else, unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth, war is hell."

(follow the link for his full statement)

Obama's Dirty Little Secret

A new book out by Rolling Stone editor Michael Hastings, The Operators, talks about how Hastings was disappointed and disgusted by Zero's behaviour in Baghdad:

After the talk, out of earshot from the soldiers and diplomats, he starts to complain. He starts to act very un-Obamalike, according to a U.S. embassy official who helped organize the trip in Baghdad.
He’s asked to go out to take a few more pictures with soldiers and embassy staffers. He’s asked to sign copies of his book. “He didn’t want to take pictures with any more soldiers; he was complaining about it,” a State Department official tells me. “Look, I was excited to meet him. I wanted to like him. Let’s just say the scales fell from my eyes after I did. These are people over here who’ve been fighting the war, or working every day for the war effort, and he didn’t want to take fucking pictures with them?"

King of Bain

Newton Gingrich might be right about Israel, but his super PAC (Political Action Committee) Winning Our Future is Republicans for Obama. They produced a video called "King of Bain" about Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital, a company that acquired other companies on the verge of bankruptcy and turned them around (and a few went under, which happens, and isn't all that bad considering just how many successes Bain had). The King of Bain video is the worst, most lie-filled, dirty, underhanded, scathing attack against capitalism since the "Story of Crap" put out by the Tides Foundation (run by New World Order top leader George Soros) and hosted by some fat ugly woman. The Obama campaign couldn't come up with anything worse than this.

The short video portrays greedy Wall Street "corporate raiders" smoking huge stogies in star chambers and plotting the downfall of the world while their faces rot away from an outbreak of liver spots and ground down teeth. Of course no mention is made that Fannie and Freddie were behind it all and the government allowed and even encouraged the greed of Wall Street similar to how someone might throw a child to a lion and then turn around and blame the lion for eating the child when eating children is the lion's nature and it was the human who threw the child over the fence in the first place!

Did you know that when Mitt Romney became CEO of Bain Capital his primary objective was to make money for the company!? He's evil! Companies don't exist to make money! He fired people, cut benefits, and sold assets!

Hold on, didn't I learn in econ class that that's what companies do? Don't all companies exist to make money? Isn't firing employees and selling assets part of taking the necessary steps to keep a firm from going bankrupt?

Bain acquired risky start ups and companies that were going to fail and lose all their jobs anyway, so when a handful turn south and jobs are lost that's not Bain's fault, that's harvesting*. The video was so vile that Newt himself scolded Winning Our Future, telling them to remove all the lies.

If the Pubs are going to act like this they might as well just hand the reelection over to Zero.

*The harvesting effect is a theory in epidemiology. From UD: "It occurs when an agent causes death in an individual who would die or enter a hospital in any case within a few days of exposure to the agent. The idea is that the agent - the assigned determining factor in death - is irrelevant. Had the patient been generally healthier they would not have succumbed to the agent. Again, had they not been exposed to the agent they would have been dead anyway within a short time. Therefore, assigning the agent as the cause of death is not truly correct."

Someone who was going to die anyway gets a disease (say Swine Flu) and dies. People falsly attribute the person's death to Swine Flu and create a public scare even though the person would have died even if they didn't get sick. The same is true of Bain Capital. Those jobs would have been lost anyway. The companies would definitely have gone under had Bain not acquired them, but Bain was not some magic wand that could solve all their problems, it was a gamble, and gambles don't always pay off, and when they don't that doesn't mean that Bain was to blame.

An Exercise In Debunking Documentaries

2012-01-11T02:00:00.001-05:00

A program called "5th Dimension" does an hour show on debunking reincarnation. It includes a case study of Shanti Devi, a girl born in India in 1926 who was tested by Gandhi and Ian Stevenson and became a media sensation in her time. Next is a segment with Stevenson's research, followed by a story from Pueblo, USA, of Bridey Murphy. It ends with a segment about the Dalai Lama.

Of course people like the head of the Indian (ir-)Rationalist Association Sanal Edamaruku like to say it's all fake (he actually does say that). He says that belief in reincarnation was created to explain the caste system, and, by extension, "takes away the sense of enterprise in people." Does it? Untouchable (Dalit) K. R. Narayana became President of India, and fellow untouchable K. G. Balakrishnan became Chief Justice of India. That's about as far from having their sense of enterprise taken away as you can get. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the highest level Brahmin, strove to destroy the caste system, as did Gandhi, another Brahmin. If the lowest of the low and the highest of the high can work together, both achieving great things, how is it that belief in reincarnation destroys their desire to strive and better their lives? In light of that it is safe to say that Edamaruku's criticism falls apart.

As a side note, the term "rationalist" means someone who believes true knowledge cannot be attained through the senses, only through the rational mind. This is in sharp contrast with people like Edamaruku who believes that the mind doesn't exist, that everything is dead matter, and that knowledge can only come from the senses. Fundamaterialist skep-dick debunkers like to hijack the word "rationalist" and "rational" to mean its opposite, just like they like to hijack the word "nothing" to mean "the quantum vacuum that has existed forever into the past".

There's also Prof. Phillip Sharp (or Shar or something, the narrator has a thick accent and no spelling is given and none of the people interviewed are acknowledged in the credits!), a white guy who uses a version of Bob Couttie's argument against Devi's case (see page 14 in my Forbidden Knowledge). Couttie said that just because a record of a chemical plant's bad safety existed somewhere several hours before the plant exploded (the report was filed on the same day it exploded) coupled with fear of chemical plants that a housewife some distance away having a premonition of the explosion can be explained away by cryptamnesia of her hearing about this report. Even though there's no evidence that the housewife or indeed anyone in the town in which she lived or anyone she knew had any knowledge of this report, and no evidence that even existence of this report got out before the accident, Couttie says that the mere existence of the report justifies the extreme likelihood of a Rube Goldberg nonpsychic explanation for how the housewife had the premonition. Similarly Prof. Sharp says that just because Devi's husband in a former life visited her neighborhood in Delhi to do business means that Devi likely overheard the man and that's how she got the idea of her past life, and correctly identified people she never met, and made a great deal of correct statements of a city she never went to. For skep-dicks as long as a non-psychic explanation is not impossible that means there is at least a 99.999% chance that the non-psychic explanation is the correct one. Actual scientists, on the other hand, like Ian Stevenson, conduct huge amounts of actual research to produce cases suggestive of reincarnation.

Archskep-dick Chris French chimes in, saying children with past life memories are all cultural dependent, which conveniently ignores children with past life memories who come from cultures that are neutral or hostile to belief in reincarnation. If pressed he would come up with some bullshit response.

Overall if a student gave me this to grade I would give it a D+, maybe a C- but only because of the stuff at the end with the Dalai Lama and Robert Thurman. This should serve as an example of how NOT to do a documentary.

God, The Devil, and Tim Tebow (TEMP)

2012-01-10T00:39:00.004-05:00

This post will be officially written Tuesday or Wednesday (depending on how much else I have to type). It will look into issues such as prayer, miracles, suffering, and Denver Bronco's star QB Tim Tebow. Not only will it delve into theological and philosophical issues, but psychological and sociological issues related to who likes Tebow (lots of ordinary people), who hates him (the media and the Bronc's head staff), and why.

I've been wanting to do this for a while now but the tipping point was this post from The Blaze (a non-mainstream news site I subscribe to to get updates in politics and technology mostly).

By the way, the title is based off of a very short lived TV series called God, The Devil, and Bob, which was basically the book of Job adapted to modern times (and yes, Job plays a huge part in my analysis of the Tebow story). Some church lobby didn't like it so it was pulled. That was ten years ago. Now no church has the power to pull things from television, except the "Church" of Scientology which pulled that South Park episode.

An Adult Discussion On Gay Marriage

2012-01-09T00:12:00.002-05:00

What is their superior logical realisation that makes gay marriage proponents, one of the smallest minorities of all time, right and polygamy proponents, the largest majority of all time, wrong?

There are some things you dare not say. Like what? Oh, I dare not say it.

ANY response to legalising gay marriage other than "yes, immediately" is one of those things that dare not be spoken, and presidential hopeful Rick Santorum (the one from Iowa who appeared out of nowhere and very very nearly beat Mitt Romney) found that out a few days ago.

I could have just as easily opened with "you know someone has lost the argument when they refuse to listen to anyone else's point of view," or "you know someone has no logical reason for their belief when they refuse to listen to anyone else's point of view."

Now, I've debated people on just about everything, and I can tell you that part of a debate involves listening to what the other person has to say. You can completely disagree but you at least have to listen and provide a reasoned response otherwise you're an asshole and you don't want to convince anyone that you're right, you just want to bully them into shutting up and stepping in line. That's the same with EVERYONE that I have ever heard* who has ever voiced the opinion that gay marriage should be legal. Watch this two minute segment below:

What is the first thing you noticed wrong with the questioner's argument? I'll give you a hint: it appears at 6 seconds in. She says "all men are created equal" (no argument there) and "have a right to happiness." If you look at the founding documents, none say that we have a right to happiness. The Declaration of Independence says we have a right to "life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness," and the Constitution say that the government cannot deny us our rights to "life, liberty, or property without due process," but neither says we have the right to happiness. Persuing happiness is way different from happiness just like persuing the Loch Ness Monster is way different to finding the Loch Ness Monster. You don't ever have to be happy, but you have to at least be able to try to be happy, even if you fail. That's the difference.

Saying everyone has the right to happiness is something that is impossible to legislate because then we would have to first define what happiness is is a way that everyone would agree to (which is probably impossible, as most people can't even define happiness for themselves), then find some way to regulate thought so everyone could have this single definition of happiness. One scenario, in which you have the right to persue happiness, gives you maximum freedom, and the other, where you have the right to happiness, makes you a thought slave to some necessarily omniscient government body.

Let's give this off-camera person the benefit of the doubt and say she misspoke. She meant to say "persuit" but just forgot. Okay. I forget things all the time.

Santorum then goes on with a Socratean approach, asking questions to find out the limits of his interlocutor's argument and see if any problems arise. He first asks "are we saying that everyone should have the right to marry?" The audience cheers so we can assume they agree. He then asks "so anyone can marry anyone else?" and the audience agrees again.

Right here we can see a problem in the audience's position. "Anyone can marry anyone else." So a 60 year old can marry an 8 year old? Under the condition "anyone can marry anyone else" the answer is "yes." If the audience disagrees then the followup of "why?" should be asked, because if they disagree then they don't believe that "anyone can marry anyone else," or else they are defining marriage to mean something that excludes certain classes of people, such as 8 year olds. This is how the Socratic method works, but you won't get the audience to follow any of their beliefs through to their conclusions because this is not about reason.

Santorum could have gone the route that I just went but he presented another completely valid followup question "so anyone can marry several people?" And it's not just me saying it is a perfectly valid question, one Ron Paul supporter tryptala (and you know my stance on Ron Paul supporters) posted the following:

His point about polygamy is perfectly valid. Why is my desire to have multiple wives different from a man wanting to marry a man? They are both non-normal forms of marriage in our particular culture. One does not have more justification than the other. The problem is, as Ron Paul knows, the state does not belong in the marriage business. It is a religious institution and the state should get out of the authority to define marriage of any kind. It's just federal overextension of power.

My position tends to migrate slightly. While I often say that it is not the business of the state to deal with marriage at all, it is self-evident that legislating marriage in such a way as to maximise the birthing and raising of children is in the state's best interest, as has Sweden and the Roman Empire realised.

Valid a point though it may be the audience will have none of it. They shoot him down. Remember, they are not looking for a logical, adult discussion, they are looking to bully. The off-camera personality shouts back "that's not what I'm asking," as if she doesn't know how a logical, adult debate works. She will stick to this line throughout the rest of the video because she has no answer to Santorum's question. She has no way to justify her belief so she doesn't try to justify it. That's not to say that there is no way to justify her belief, just that she personally has not thought out a way to do so. Not only that, she never corrects him on her belief that everyone has a right to be happy, meaning that it was either not a misstatement, as I ventured above, and she really is stupid, or she's so ignorant of how to debate someone she becomes frozen in a flash of emotion and can't be thawed until her emotion is reciprocated or her interlocutor shuts up and cowers away.

Which brings us to the question "why is it alright for two people to marry but not three?" The Quran says a man can take up to four wives. Right there you have the holy book of one billion people, one seventh of the world's population, stating that a valid marriage can include up to five people. Are one billion people wrong, and if so why? Can fifty million Elvis fans be wrong? Yes. Are they wrong? In Nepal it is common for one woman to marry several brothers, five or six, at a time. Historically polygamy has been the norm for the overwhelming majority of humanity. The norm, meaning it has been accepted, not that it has been practically engaged by the majority of humanity, but that it has been accepted. Why is the overwhelming majority of everyone who has ever lived wrong about marriage and yet the smallest of all minorities right? What is their superior logical realisation that makes gay marriage proponents, one of the smallest minorities of all time, right and polygamy proponents, the largest majority of all time, wrong? Answer me this and you've solved the conundrum that has plagued political discourse for the past couple of decades. Answer me this and you will have for the first time presented me with a logical, adult discussion on gay marriage and not an emotion driven bully exercise.

*There may be gay marriage proponents who take part in adult discussions, but every single person that I have personally encountered just wants to bully. This makes them more intollerant than the 9/11 truthers, Islamists, anti-Israel people, and anti-religion secular humanists, all whom I have actually been able to get adult discussions out of despite vehemently disagreeing with.

Plutarch On Love (Repost - 15 February 2008)

2012-01-08T23:36:00.004-05:00

I was reading Plutarch's Dialogue on Love when I got to thinking. Daphnaeus, who plays the part of Plutarch, seems to have some very good things to say about sexuality, responsibility, and self-satisfaction.

The modern notions of human sexuality would be completely alien to the ancient Greeks as their notions are alien to people living today. People from Greece, today, complained about Oliver Stone's movie Alexander for portraying Alexander the Great as a homosexual, yet not only does the film not portray Alexander as homosexual (even considering the one minute deleted scene where Alexander and Bagoas are getting ready to have sex) but the concept didn't exist in his time that exists today. What happened between a man and a woman, or a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or a woman and a woman and a man (I don't need to go through all the combinations) was a seperate sphere of society as what happened at home to keep your duty to the state. People persued sexual liasons outside the home, with members of the same sex and the opposite sex and at the end of the day went home and (at least tried) to be good spouses and to have children and raise them right. Sex could be about individual physical pleasure but it also was a show of power and authority one person held over a subordinate. How would you show you are someone's superior -- through sexual acts.

The ancient Greeks made it clear: you are free to express yourself sexually any way you want, but society runs by order and every member of that society has a duty to fulfill (a dharma) to keep that order in place and assure everybody is happy and safe. And what is one of the primary duties a Greek citizen has to uphold the order? That would be to create and maintain a good home and to have children. What you do at home is for the children, not for you; what you do outside the home is for you, but at home you have a duty to your children because they are the future of the state and maintaining the order of the state is your duty. When you put it like that notions of homosexuals and heterosexuals seem unimportant. Marriage isn't about love, it's about children; it's about admitting there's something bigger and more important than your petty self-endulgence and your personal enjoyment. I think in our culture ruled by materialism we have forgotten this.

And what did Plutarch say? Protogenes is going on for hours about how women are incapable of feeling love and that the only true love that can exist is betwen two men (actually between a man and a boy), and that it is only begrudgingly he fulfills the lawful requirement of having kids with his wife. After courteously letting him talk for a long time Daphnaeus chuckles and retorts something to the effect of "well, Protogenes, you say that you cannot know love except the love that exists between two men but we all know what happens between you and your wife when you get home, and you certainly don't seem to be reluctant or antipathetic about it."

US Navy Rescues Persian Fishermen

2012-01-07T22:31:00.003-05:00

The Persians want to close the Strait of Hormuz, from which 35% of the world's oil flows (other wiki's numbers). They want all US ships out of the area and are making threats. The President has enacted legislation that he can punish anyone doing business witht he Persians. Tensions are high, but in spite of everything the crew of the USS Kidd, one of the ships the Persians wants out of their waters, rescued 13 Persian fishermen from Somali pirates the other day. The Navy released about 20 seconds of grainy video of the situation.

The Hawkeye Cauci and The Most Dangerous Man in the World

2012-01-03T21:18:00.007-05:00

After Mitt Romney spent more money than humanly possible to completely destroy Newt Gingrich he removed from the race in Iowa everyone else except the most dangerous man in the world: Ron Paul. First some history.

Iowa is a little state, kind of like a little country really. It is really, really empty. Iowa's biggest "city" is Des Moines, which is actually pronounced "Day Moyn" but you would never guess it, is pretty much the only place where people actually live with vast, empty land stretching out for hundreds of miles in every direction. Their crown jewel is a place called Hawkeye Point, a 40 foot hill which is the flattest "highest" elevation on any part of the planet. The site is marked by a grain silo. Nobody knows what happens here, what they produce, or what their culture is. The biggest thing to happen in Iowa is the famous Hawkeye Cauci, that happens every four years. People from all over the country descend upon tiny tiny Iowa to watch presidential hopefuls duke it out then leave the state to its own devices for another four years. Since nobody ever gives Iowa anything they were allowed to have their presidential caucuses before every other state, all the way in January, dragging the presidential campaigns out to ten damn months.

Since 1979 the winner of the Hawkeye Cauci has gone on to win the party nomination roughly 50% of the time, meaning that for all the hype the Hawkeye Cauci is no better than a coin toss at predicting anything.

ADDENDUM
From the AP: With 100% of precincts reporting, relative unknown Rick Santorum has taken first place in the Hawkeye Cauci with 29,908 votes, or 24.6%. Mitt Romney is in very close second with 29,874 votes, or 24.5%. Ron Paul came in third with 26,097 votes, or 21.4%, and Newt Gingrich, the defeated, got 16,161 votes, or 13.3%. It is now safe to say that Rick Santorum, whoever he is, now has a 50-50 chance of winning the Republican presidential nomination for 2012.

ADDENDUM 2
The AP's report as of 2 am was inaccurate. Romney won with 30,015 votes and Santorum came in second with 30,007.

Enough of that, now on to why Ron Paul is the most dangerous man in the world. For the sake of the world it may be better to let Obama have a second term to put Ron Paul into office, should he become the Republican nominee. Let's look at some facts.

Ron Paul had no idea what the content of his own newsletter was.
Now being a doctor is hard work, and Mr. Paul has had a long career in doctoring and bringing babies into the world, so he knows a thing or two about accountability. Unfortunately he let "ghostwriters" insert loads of racist crap into his newsletters under his nose for years with his only defense being "I didn't know it was there and I don't endorse it." I didn't know employees were running an illegal international organ trafficking ring in my shipping company, and I don't endorse it, so I shouldn't be held responsible for being an accessory to their crimes.* No one is questioning Paul's sincerity in stating his ignorance and rejection of the racist crap people were doing under his name, but the United States is a much larger enterprise than a tiny newsletter. If Ron Paul doesn't know and doesn't endorse what's going on behind his back in his own publication how can he be expected to handle the most powerful office in the world?

Ron Paul is dangerously isolationist.
Many a Ron Paul robot has attacked me for saying the simple truth that their candidate is an isolationist. There is no shame in isolationism. There is no need to hide behind fictional categorisations of being "non-interventionist" when the truth is, Ron Paul was against the US action in Afghanistan following the attacks of 9/11. The very same attacks that provoked near unanimous approval in both houses of Congress to authorise reprisal** against al Qaeda and the Taliban (among other entities) [only California Representative Barbara Lee (D.) voted against the resolution in 2001]. Ron Paul insiders reveal that the only reason Paul voted in favour of the resolution is because his entire staff threatened to resign and he knew he could never win re-election anywhere ever if he did.
Ron Paul believes that the United States should not have gotten involved in fighting Germany in the Second World War, even though they declaired war on the US after Pearl Harbor. He firmly believes that it was not the job of the US to save the Jews from Hitler's death camps and that FDR knew about the Pearl Harbor attacks before they happened and used them as a pretext for war. If saving millions of people from Hitler isn't worth fighting for nothing is.
As bad as Obama's foreign policy is it absolutely pales in comparison to Ron Paul's psychopathic complacency toward genocide.
Ron Paul certainly would let North Korea invade South Korea, starting the Third World War and killing tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people and perhaps permanantly destroying the global economy.
Ron Paul certainly would let Persia get nuclear weapons, and let them disseminate those weapons to every terror group and rogue state on the planet, and use those nuclear weapons to attack Israel. In so doing Ron Paul is perfectly unmoved by the thought that anyone should have the capability to kill everyone by initiating an all out nuclear war.

Ron Paul is a 9/11 "truther".
As you know, 9/11 "truth" is the biggest load of bullshit ever. Former Ron Paul staffer Eric Dondaro states: "He immediately stated to us staffers, me in particular, that Bush/Cheney were going to use the attacks as a precursor for ‘invading’ Iraq. He engaged in conspiracy theories including perhaps the attacks were coordinated with the CIA, and that the Bush administration might have known about the attacks ahead of time. He expressed no sympathies whatsoever for those who died on 9/11."

Ron Paul is anti-Israel
Ron Paul sides with a completely fictional group of people who have no history and were invented for political reasons in the early 20th century, wants to abolish the state of Israel, which was created by the British as a result of a legitimate peace treaty that gave them legitimate power to do so after defeating the Ottomans in a legitimate war, and give everything to the Arabs "from the river to the sea." As if being perfectly content with Hitler murdering millions of Jews he now wants to kick them out of their country that has been their legitimate home for the past 3200 years.

Does this not disgust you? If the imminent threat of hundreds of millions of people being killed in nuclear war or complacency with genocide is what you want then you can vote for Ron Paul and then go straight to Hell.

*Neither Ron Paul or myself has taken part in illegal organ trafficking. This is merely a rhetorical device.

**Reprisal is a limited military action, in violation of international law, taken against another sovereign entity that has already broken international law in attacking another sovereign entity. It is not the same thing as a war. The Afghan people live in a culture that accepts revenge and they were in full acceptance of limited actions against al Qaeda and the Taliban, whom they hated greatly. Nobody knew those limited actions would last a decade and cost half a trillion dollars, even if bin Laden was killed and the Taliban decapitated.

Transpersonal Psychology: A Brief Definition (300th Post!)

2012-01-02T23:54:00.004-05:00

Here's a nice video on transpersonal psychology, transpersonal events, mysticism, Ken Wilber, and some other stuff. Runs 12:12 (perfect for 2012).

Timur's Body

2011-12-28T00:04:00.003-05:00

Some people are so evil that not even death can stop them.

Fig. 1: Amir Timur statue, Uzbekistan

Timur was the son of some middle class dude in Transoxiana (modern day Uzbekistan, home of what used to be the Aral Sea, the Sogdian Rock, magnificent architecture, and Khiva, one of the last independent kingdoms of the 20th century to be battled over between the British and Russians in the Great Game. You also can't read the Bible, use the Internet, and prisoners are frequently tortured to death). He had ambitions. Unsatisfied with his prospects, Timur became a warrior and decided to conquer the Mongol empire like his hero Chingis Khan. To achieve this goal he invented a fake geneology linking him to the great Khan and married the Khan's granddaughter.

Timur then conquered the Persian Il-Khanate ("little" Khanate), and half of the Chagatai Khanate. He punished the Golden Horde for overstepping their boundaries as tributary state, permanantly destroying their economy. His greatest passtime during this period was abducting scholars and artists and transporting them to Samarkand, which they were to make into the most magnificent city in the world. He also liked to slaughter tens of thousands of people and make towers out of their heads for no other purpose than because it looked cool.

Timur's next venture was to prove that he is "not a man of blood" and that "God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always been the authors of their own calamity." He looked to the Quran for advice whether to slaughter every single person in India or every single person in China for being infidels and India turned out to be closer. He went there with his army and destroyed the Delhi Sultanate because they were the wrong kind of Muslims. He proceededt o ravage India, slaughtering more than a million people and making towers out of their heads. Every time his men would slaughter 20,000 Indians in a single afternoon he would throw a massive two day long feast so they could revel in their own crapulence.

Satisfied that it would take over a century for the subcontinent to repopulate he went West to slaughter the Ottomans for being the wrong kind of Muslim. In a bloody battle, Timur killed the Ottoman sultan and threw the empire into chaos. He also depopulated nearby Christian kingdoms for being infidels as well as other Muslim kingdoms for being the wrong kind of Muslims.

Fig. 2: Timur's Empire at the time of his death in 1405.

Something was still eating away at Timur. He was getting old and he hadn't slaughtered everyone in China yet, nor had he conquered the entire Mongol empire. He saddled up his army and went to China, but the weather was bad and he died. His body was placed in a lavish tomb in Samarkand with a curse: should anyone remove his body a fate more terrible will befall them than if Timur himself would ravish their country. Like the curse of King Tut, Timur's curse had real power to it. Unlike Tut's curse, which only claimed the lives around 20 people (and a dog and a bird), Timur's curse claimed the lives of millions.

Soviet archaeologists/tomb raiders broke into Timur's tomb in June 1941. Two days later Hitler broke the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, launching Operation Barbarosa, the largest single military campaign ever. Eastern Europe would be devastated, millions would die both soldiers and civilians, and the Nazis would take control of an additional 13% of the continent, creating the largest empire in European history. One million people would die in Leningrad, another million in Stalingrad, three million Soviet soldiers would die as Nazi prisoners, and millions of Slavs and other unwanted would be sent to die in the death camps.

Realising the gravity of the situation the Soviets reintered Timur's body in November 1942. A few days later they launched Operation Uranus, the decisive counteroffensive that would push the Nazis back from Stalingrad and pave the way for the fall of the Third Reich.

Some might scoff and say that it is merely coincidence that within days of Timur's tomb being disturbed the largest military operation ever was launched and laid waste to the Soviet Union. They will say it is mere coincidence that within days of his body being put back the tide of the war turned and the Soviets were able to gain an iron grip on Eastern Europe for the next half century. I ask, "what is the measure of coincidence?" In the scientific method you make an injunction, follow it through to collect data, and check it against the results of others who have done 1 and 2. Timur's curse is the same. There's an injunction: "remove my body and your country will be devastated." Performing the injunction leads to the data: what he said would happen happened. The experiment was done in reverse with the reverse results: Timur's body was put back and the enemies of the Soviet Union were devastated and the Soviet Union grew in power undreamed of previously. The only thing missing is step three, repeating the experiment, which is a very bad idea in this case as the intended result is millions of people dying.

What we're left with is a mystery. Timur's curse did exactly what it said it would when it said it would, which is strong evidence in its favour. Unfortunately morality prevents us from testing his curse again so we can't be 100% certain. Still, for what it's worth, it's made a believer out of me.

A Tale of Two Cities

2011-12-25T00:30:00.003-05:00

There are two towns named Bethlehem in the Holy Land.

Tradition places the site of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem near Jerusalem, which currently sits in the Palestinian territory. A journey here from Nazareth would have taken weeks; not the kind of trip for a woman about to give birth to take.

There is another town named Bethlehem right next to Nazareth, about two days journey to the Northwest. It is more likely that it was this Bethlehem, not the more famous one to the South, where Jesus was born.

This map was made in 2009 and shows some well known sites in the Holy Land.

Staff's Top 10 Stories of 2011

2011-12-23T01:20:00.002-05:00

As you'll know there are more posts tagged "2011" than anything else. This has been a very busy year with a lot of very important stories. Difficult though it may be to choose the top ten, here's what we at The Urban Mystic have decided upon. There is some overlap with what the readers chose yesterday.

1. The Economy, Stupid
Whether we're talking about the gargantuan matrix that is the US tax code, all 71,684 pages, admonisions from economist Niall Ferguson on the need to stop spending, S&P downgrading the US credit rating from AAA to AA+, or real unemployment being close to 20%, the economy has touched all of our lives. It has touched every piece of news in the past year and will be the salient issue in next year's presidential election. Surprisingly none of the readers thought so.

2. The World Gone Mad
It's not every day that a fictional story turns into reality. The so called "Arab Spring" that was warned about here and, again, by Niall Ferguson, turned the world upside down, decapitated several governments, and spilled over to Europe and America. Ranking number 4 on the popular list, this is one the readers definitely understood the significance of.

3. Sathya Sai Baba's Mahasamadhi
Baba's premature departure really hit hard. It was a troubling time for millions around the world.

4. The Israeli/Palestinian Issue
Whether it be the numerous outlines of the true history of Israel dating back to the stone age, or the original borders of the British mandate, or simply the fact that the Palestinians are unwilling to ever accept peace with Israel, this is one of the most important stories of all time, let alone of 2011. Draw a circle around Israel 300 miles across and you will not find a more free country. Instead you will find a policy of human rights violations, religious persecution, sex discrimination, and genocide. It is of paramount importance to defend Israel and their right to exist.

5. 7 Billion People and Demographic Collapse
2011 saw the birth of baby 7 billion and prompted actions correcting the myth of overpopulation. There are not too many people on the world. To the contrary, way too many people are being killed in sex-selective abortions, especially in China.

6. The Tenth Annaversary of 9/11
This year was not only a time to reflect on 9/11, the sacrifices made, the heroics displayed, it was also the time we tied up the loose ends and came full circle with the death of Osama bin Laden. For a decade he had been the boogie man lurking in the shadows of children's nightmares, then he was shot, unceramoniously dumped in the sea, and made top secret for no good reason. What the hell, the son of a bitch is dead, let's celebrate.

7. My Little Pony
Certainly one of the greatest things to happen to my life, and certainly the most popular post ever on The Urban Mystic. I think we've all learned more than 100 things from My Little Pony, including something about ADHD and depression and how to deal with affluence without becoming an ass.

8. Integral Politics
It spawned a legend. It spawned a sequel. It spawned a really long, confusing thing about history too. Whether you're left, right, or fall toward one of the other eight ends of the political spectrum, there's something here for you.

9. NASA Nixes Climate Change
NASA's 11 year study (2000-2011) definitively killed any notion of climate change by showing that the upper atmosphere has not only not warmed but it's hemorrhaging heat at an alarming rate. Any story from NASA that uses the term "alarmist" that many times in reference to the climate change proponents has got to turn heads. It's the greatest step forward in getting rid of this albatross since November 2009's Climategate scandal.

10. Forbidden Knowledge
Okay, which story has had the most contributers? Which story has created more posts than any other? Which story is the bane of The Urban Mystic? Here's a hint, "Google Bob Coutie + Nitinol". It's Bob Coutie's forbidden attacks on Uri Geller that led to the longest post in Urban Mystic History and love it or hate it a story can't have that big an effect and not make it to the list.

Kim Jong Ir Is Stone Dead

2011-12-18T23:14:00.006-05:00

The supreme reader, dictator of arr North Korea (bad Korea) Kim Jong Ir is stone dead. Any time someone evir dies it's good for the worrd, even if there are worse, unforseen consequences, which may happen as his son takes command of one of the worrd's rargest armies. Wirr the war between the two Koreas heat up? Nearry 20 mirrion sordiers can be mobirised at the drop of a hat. This could very werr be the event that tips the barance of the worrd from mere chaos to totar war. We must pray coorer heads prevair. Untir then, we can cerebrate that the worrd's most ronery man is with us no ronger.

Author's Note:
No comments from liberal racists will be accepted that say this post is racist for making fun of one of the evilest people of the past half century. If anything they should be rejoicing the fact that now, maybe, the North Korean people may get some basic human rights and dignity.

Christopher Hitchens In Memoriam

2011-12-17T01:26:00.004-05:00

Christopher Hitchens has died 15 December 2011 from pneumonia at the age of 62. The famous outspoken atheist intellectual, author of many articles and the book God Is Not Great, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last year. Many will remember him as the atheist who was not a liberal (though, as he said many times, he was not conservative either). He attacked Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal for saying that US foreign policy created al Qaeda and that 9/11 was due punishment for American imperialism. He defended the atomic bombing of Japan at the end of the Second World War, and called out Hitler and Stalin as the two evilest people ever. While an outspoken atheist, Hitchens extended his gratitude toward those who prayed for him during his time of need.

Here is David Berlinski's eulogy.

The Truth About Palestinian Refugees

2011-12-16T23:25:00.003-05:00

"Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon explains the historical facts relating to the issue of refugees in the Israeli Palestinian conflict."

The Arabs have used their own refugees as a political football, kicking them around, never permitting them to settle to perpetuate the illusion that Israel is evil. For six decades these unfortunate people have been denied education, habitation, and employment just to serve the twisted, antisemetic ends of corrupt rulers.

The UN is no better. While more money is spent on Palestinian refugees than all other refugees combined, they have seen no benefit from the UN's efforts.

Runs 5:30

The Palestinians Are Fake or Why I Like Newt Gingrich

2011-12-15T23:13:00.003-05:00

"1209 BC is the earliest recording of the name "Israel" as a place or group of people occupying a place. In contrast, the earliest recording of the name "Palestine" as a place comes from Herodotus' Histories, written 750 years later."

Last week Newt Gingrich ("Ingrinch" will be his joke name should he become president*, to join the ranks of Billy Boy, Capital Bush, and Zero) said in an interview with The Jewish Channel that the Palestinians are an "invented people." Gingrich, a student of history, is the first politician in living memory to have the balls to state the truth. Every single word in that one minute clip is historically accurate. There never were a Palestinian people. There never was a Palestinian state. Watch the clip below:

The British defeated the Ottoman Empire and as part of the peace treaty recieved the land that would become Israel, Jordan, and Iraq. This was a legitimate territorial acquisition as decided in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne. Prior to this time the area of greater Syria (the area in question) was ruled by the Ottoman Empire for five hundred years.

Prior to that the region was controlled by the Mamluks, Turkish slaves who revolted against their Egyptian rulers. Prior to that the Arab Caliphate conquered part of the Roman Empire. The Romans conquered the Jewish state of Judea around the turn of the calendar and kicked the Jews out of Jerusalem after the Bar Kokhba revolt in 136 AD, merging Judea with the province of Syria to create Syria-Palestine.

The Jews ran the place before the Romans came in, for about 100 years, after serving as clients under the Greeks who took over everything in 323 with Alexander the Great, who loved the Jews and was a great champion of Jewish culture. Alexander beat the Persians, who were in charge before. The Persians were also champions of the Jews, so much so that Cyrus the Great, who freed the Jews from Babylon, is the only Gentile/Goy to be named Messiah in the Bible.

The Babylonians/Chaldeans crushed the Jewish kingdom of Judah and ruled from 597 to 539 BC under Nebuchadnezzar II (not to be confused with Morpheus' ship, Nebuchadnezzar Mark III, No. 11). He's the one that made the famous Ishtar Gate, now in Berlin, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the World until the Colossus of Rhodes was built.

Judah was the southern kingdom, comprising two of the twelve tribes, Judah and Benjamin. The northern ten tribes were united as the kingdom of Israel. The two kingdoms used to be united, and also named Israel, but the northern tribes were wicked so the Assyrians conquered them and spread them out to the far corners of the world, thus creating the ten lost tribes. Some of those lost tribes may have been sent to Africa as DNA tests show, as well as Afghanistan, where Alexander (see above) encountered a small community of Jews living isolated from the world. The kingdom of Judah remained a client of the Assyrians.

The original, united, kingdom of Israel included territory on both sides of the Jordan river, comprising large parts of the modern states of Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. Israel was established, probably, by Joshua. We can't know for certain. What we do know is that a stone inscription called the Merneptha Stele, located in the Cairo Museum (probably, if the Egyptian protesters didn't destroy it), carved probably in 1209 BC, mentions the kingdom of Israel as an independent entity that the Egyptians had their eye on. This document is the earliest recording of the name "Israel" as a place or group of people occupying a place. In contrast, the earliest recording of the name "Palestine" as a place comes from Herodotus' Histories, written 750 years later.

Before that the land was called Canaan. Major Canaanite cities such as Jericho and Hazor were destroyed in the 16th or 15th century BC, before the scholars place the Exodus, the so called "late" dating, which happened AFTER the Merneptha Stele records the existence of an established Israel. The conquest of Canaan couldn't have happened over night, and it couldn't have happened after Israel existed, so the late date of the Exodus is wrong. Can we place the Exodus around the time of the destruction of the Canaanite cities? Yes. The grain at the city of Jericho and other sites was burned along with the cities, not plundered, just as Joshua told his army to do. Any invading army would plunder the cities they sack, but Joshua told his men not to plunder the sites. The goods of the city belong to God, not the Israelites, so they have to burn, not plunder them. This is exactly what we find, and exactly what would be expected if Joshua destroyed the city, not some fictional people hundreds of years prior. The dates of the destruction of the cities is based on hard evidence, the dates of the Exodus is based on speculation from texts. Speculation is far from evidence. Speculation can be wrong, and the Exodus can be a 16th century event.

Before that? The Canaanites were some semi-nomadic pastoralist people living between the Egyptians and Hittites. They seem to have been there forever. Who were the Canaanites? No one knows. Abraham, the first Jew, came from Ur, near the Mesopotamian marshes, and died in Canaan. Canaan became his adopted home. His descendents lived in Canaan. The Canaanites and the descendents of Abraham comingled and became one, save for the difference of one group being monotheists. The Israelites were Canaanites when the Egyptians enslaved them. They returned to Canaan after the Exodus as it was their home. Why the destruction of Canaanite cities if they were kin? Probably to route out all the non-believers. It was a revolution, a civil war; one that the Israelites won.

What about the modern day Palestinians? Where do they fit in? Well, the British decieded to give the land of Israel to the Jews and the land of Jordan to the Arabs, but the Arabs want everything "from the river to the sea" and refuse to except their lot. Both the Jordanians and the Egyptians took "Palestinian" refugees after the 1967 Six-Day War. For decades the Jordanians and Egyptians did nothing. They didn't give the Palestinians their own state. When Israel gave back Jordanian and Egyptian land the Palestinians rushed back and demanded everything "from the river to the sea." The Egyptians and Jordanians bitched about how the Israelis won't give the Palestinians what they themselves would not give. The Arabs are hypocrites and liars. They hated the Jews since the Jews wouldn't accept Muhammad as a prophet. The Arabs took Syria-Palestine from the Romans and told the Jews to submit, but the Jews wouldn't. Jewish belief says that there have been no prophets since Malachi. They weren't about to accept that another prophet arose in the centuries since so the Arabs got pissed off and decided to hate the Jews forever.

There you have it, the history of the land of Israel going back to before the bronze age as well as the history of antisemitism. Newt Gingrich is the only candidate with balls enough to acknowledge this history, and that's why I support him.

*You don't get honoured with a joke name until you're elected.

The Fear of Enlightenment

2011-12-06T21:51:00.002-05:00

Alan Watts explains the fear of finding out you are already enlightened. What is the solution? The guru gives you work to do to wear down your barriers.
Runs 9:08

Death Comes Calling II

2011-12-06T17:25:00.002-05:00

My new monitor just arrived: a Compaq FS7600e, which is square instead of rectangular like normal monitors. So far it's nice. It's a little bright because the bulb inside is new*, which I have to get used to again. The only problem so far is the smell. All new electronics have a smell, and this one has a particularly strong smell. It's a bit annoying but the "outgassing" as it is technically called will go away in two or three weeks. *And by "new" I think it was manufactured in 2006 and left in a warehouse because no one wanted it until now.

Affluence And Apathy, or Why I Love Rarity

2011-12-04T03:00:00.000-05:00

I can say with the utmost confidence that, while other ponies and all their special episodes may disappoint, without any question, there has never been nor will there likely ever be a disappointing episode focusing on Rarity. Consistently she remains top notch, above and beyond others in excellence and grace. She stands as a beacon overlooking all the pageantry, bizarre little oddities (Over A Barrel), and endless parades of Dash getting away with absolutely everything like some grand scale karma Houdini. Unlike all the others, who may at times descend into madness (or "go cupcakes"), Rarity manages to hold onto her poise and grace while always finding it in herself to give to her fullest ability to anypony in need.

One need no other example than Sisterhooves Social where she put aside all comfort for the sake of her sister, going so far as to disguise herself as Applejack and get as dirty as possible. She did it all gladly for Sweetie Belle, who was an obnoxious, selfish jackass (like all, or certainly most, little kids). She was able to maintain her grace even among the diamond dogs worst attempts at breaking her. She never lost her head, she never sank to their level, she just bit her lip, bore the discomfort of their imprisonment, and used her wits to extricate herself from captivity.

Time and again Rarity reveals to us that she is no one trick pony like so many others. AJ is still the rough and tumble farmer's daughter, Twi is still the anal nerd, Dash is still the asshole Mary Sue, Pinkie Pie still teeters on the brink of cupcakes, and Fluttershy still warns us to beware the quiet ones. Contrasted against the others Rarity has a depth of personality that is unrivaled by the rest of the mane six put together. She has beauty, brains, and heart, sense and style, cleverness, compassion, and propriety all rolled into one fabulous package. I dare say Rarity is everything anypony could ever want in a girl. She'll go on a quest to slay the dragon and look stunning doing it. She'll work herself to exhaustion for her friends. She'll put others before herself and bear the slings required of the peace keeper. She may go overboard at times, but everypony does and Rarity is certainly not above apologising for her wrongs.

It is for all that that I hold Rarity up as an example for us all, especially in these troubled times.

The problem of the world today is the disease of Affluenza, which isn't really a disease, but neither is ADHD or depression, even though drug companies make billions off of both, so why not add one more, and one that is so troubling to so many millions?

First permit me to clarify. I'm not saying that there are not people who actually have ADHD or depression, just that they are not diseases and cannot be cured (or treated, since nothing in psychiatry is ever cured) like diseases with drugs. The psychiatry disease angle is a scam.

Depression is a mental condition in which anger is repressed and turned inward toward one's self. It is overcome by introspecting to uproot the anger (best when done under the auspices of a qualified therapist), not by blocking dopamine or seratonin. Taking drugs to fix depression is like taking drugs to fix an amputated arm. The best course of action for dealing with depression is a combination of cognitive behaviour therapy and lots of physical exercise (one British study showed that walking more than 30 minutes a day was several times more effective than any available drug at fixing depression, and walking alone was more effective than walking while taking drugs, indicating that the drugs actually worsen the symptoms of depression!).

ADHD and all its various permutations (the more types of disorder the psychiatric community can create the more money they can make selling people drugs) are just names for being a boy and not having parents who do their job. The first undeniable truth about the universe everyone learns is that boys and girls are different. It has always been for hundreds of thousands of years that boys and girls think and learn differently, and within the larger categories of boys and girls are a whole spectrum of sub-types. None are wrong or defective or diseased, just different.

Unfortunately, the pussification of America threw that undeniable fact out and replaced it with the idea that everyone is the same and has to be taught the same and if anyone doesn't fit into that narrow mold they must be diseased. Since America was pussified and only girls have pussies, that means that girls are normal. If girls are normal then, by definition, boys must be defective. No longer do boys and girls think differently, needing different modes of learning and discipline. Nope, everyone must be taught the same and they must be taught like girls. Since boys don't learn like girls, since they want to run around and rough house and compete and follow rules and have winners and losers*, then boys must be defective. If boys are no longer allowed to win and lose, if they can't run and shout and mes around then of course they'll look for outlets to their masculinity where it is deemed inappropriate. They don't need drugs, they just need proper masculine discipline and training so they can grow up into proper men. They need parents who get off their fat asses and tell them to sit down and shut up when in public (behavioural training). They need to be told to follow rules begrudgingly and most of all they need a chance to rough house with one another outside and express their natural masculine violent proclivities.

Getting back to the topic at hand, or society is afflicted by the dreaded disease of Affluenza and it is Rarity who can show us the way to overcome this plague.

In the past century, more so the past 50 years, mores the past generation, and the past decade, Western society has become more affluent. We don't have to worry about working for our food, the government gives it to us and the grocery store is always fully stocked. We don't have to have twelve children because eight of them won't die from measles or whooping cough. We don't have to write letters or look for pay phones or wait to see our friends, they are always at hand. Our lives in the West have become so easy that we have become bored and must now look or excuses to complain about things. We have to work to find a reason to bitch and moan about how "unfair" our lives are. Our blessings are so many that we must focus on the few areas of our lives that contain lack for fear of being overwhelmed with gratitude. We are the 1% in all of human history, holding ore wealth and opulence than kings and emperors of years gone by could ever dream of. This is Affluenza.

The problem stems from two unhealthy byproducts of extreme affluence: narcissism and apathy. We literally throw away enough food to feed the entire world many times over. No one ever need go hungry, just kill the warlords and give the starving refugees the garbage we won't eat.

In Sweet and Elite we see Rarity, an affluent pony, stand in stark contrast with a rather uppity fellow from Canterlot, Jet Set, along with his wife Upper Crust. Jet Set and Upper Crust exemplify Affluenza. Against them is Rarity and her new friend (and mentor?) Fancy Pants, both of whom can keep their heads despite their success (though Fancy Pants plays coy to get Rarity to display her good nature, almost as a master would his apprentice). Fancy Pants urges Rarity on to defend her friends at the Canterlot Garden Party, however uncouth, or downright destructive, they may be. Jet Set and Upper Crust, stricken with Affluenza, are appalled at Rarity's display of her loyalty but they are quickly shot down by Fancy Pants coming to her aid.

Rarity exemplifies how to be good affluent. She shows us the way out of Affluenza, minus the occasional theatrics if we may be so inclined. I would advise all of you, myself included, and especially the occupy pussies, to look to Rarity as the inoculation against the dreaded disease of Affluenza. She just may be the one to save our world from self-destruction.

*My friends and I would play space marines and fight aliens with sticks and books, not like we were visiting neighbours, and we accepted the rules of the tames as rules, sucking it up when we lost even if we didn't like it. We didn't demand do overs to boost our self esteem. We ran around and made lots of noise and fell down and got hurt. We may have cried but we knew we were supposed to be men so we got over it.

Unemployed And Not A Pot To Piss In

2011-12-03T00:08:00.004-05:00

The new unemployment numbers are in, and, surprise surprise, Rush* was right again. The official unemployment numbers puts unemployment at 8.6%, down from 9% last month. Zero and his cronies were willing to do anything to get it below 8%, because no president has ever won reelection with 9% unemployment. They got it to 8.6% and the .6 is never read aloud by the media so now everyone thinks unemployment is 8% and Zero is electable again.

Unfortunately, it's all bullshit math.

125,000 (seasonal) jobs were added, as happens every year late November until January when they're laid off again. However, to get the numbers to drop 0.4% close to half a million jobs would need to be created. How to solve this quandry? Fudge the numbers. You see, the official unemployment rate is what is called U3. It tallies people who have been looking for jobs for four weeks. What it doesn't count is people who have been receiving unemployment benefits so long that they expire after the 99 weeks, or people who give up looking for jobs. This number is called U6 and it is the true number of people who don't have jobs. The additional thousands came from the 315,000 people who are no longer receiving benefits because they have stopped looking for work. This 315,000 who are no longer officially unemployed according to the U3 definition is added to the 125,000 temp jobs that were created to give a total of 440,000 jobs created by Zero for the past month. That is how the number went down to 8.6%.

The real unemployment stats, the U6, is closer to 17%, which is nowhere near as bad as African brutal military coup nations, but it is still extreme for a highly developed, post-industrial nation. Since Zero has taken the oaf of office he has destroyed over 2.5 million jobs. That's Zero alone, not counting the jobs lost under Capital Bush. Still, think about it: one out of every six able bodied Americans doesn't have a job. This should be unexceptable. We need to stop hemorrhaging money. We need to cut everything in government. We need to vote Zero out of office and put anyone in his place, whether it be Newt Ingrinch, that guy with the hair, or whoever. Anyone is better.

*Not THAT Rush.

We're All Soft Once

2011-11-27T23:52:00.002-05:00

Alexander Tsiaras presents in under ten minutes the development of everyone from conception to birth using the latest imaging technology. Even though you were there when this happened you probably don't remember it (although Stan Groff has produced some evidence for his birth memory trauma theory, but that's a different story). Enjoy.

MIMIC

2011-11-26T00:38:00.003-05:00

The December project is the first of the GoreHäus comics. Titled "MIMIC" (all caps) here is the synopsis:

An experimental virus is loose in a lab, growing deadlier with every living thing it encounters. The researchers have to find and destroy it before it escapes.

How many pages can be finished before the end of the year? Stay tuned to find out. Cover below.

Climategate Part Two

2011-11-24T21:04:00.004-05:00

More hacked emails reveal that globa- oops! "Climate Change" (hide the decline) is fake. FOIA.org has released a zip file of 5000 additional emails* exposing the global warming conspiracy, with more waiting to be released at future opportune times. Even though the evidence is completely damning and climate change has now and forever completely been proven to be a hoax, this additional release makes for a nice gift of egg on the climate "scientists" faces. Whilst counting your blessings this Thanks Giving make sure to add Climategate 2.0 to your list.

*The Urban Mystic, Irked-Confusion Studios, and all contributers are not responsible for the content of linked files or any potential damage said files or your own stupidity may cause to your computer.

Death Comes Calling

2011-11-21T22:55:00.004-05:00

Like everything else in the universe my monitor died. It came with the computer in April 2003. Like its predecessor it lasted eight years (surprisingly). It wasn't the best monitor in the world. Lights reflected in it a strange pink colour, the glass was the most delicate thing in the world and the act of breathing on it caused smudges to appear that had to be cleaned almost daily, it was too big to fit with my cabinets so they had to be taken down, and it weighed about 60 pounds. Unlike the previous one, an IBM which just refused to turn on one day, this one, an HP model, turned on with half the screen completely black and the other half doing the Hula. At least it had the decency to tell me it was dying.

Relying on a stopgap replacement for the time being I checked the net to discover, to my horror, that nearly all manufacturers have stopped production of CRT monitors in favour of shitty LCDs. The problems with LCDs are legion: the viewing angle is practically non-existant, each pixel has to be viewed at 0 degrees (normal to the pixel), so to avoid distortion you either have to constantly move your head around or sit 20 feet back (because of the way the human eye works 20 feet is practically the same as infinity), at which point I won't see anything and will have to knock a few walls down; most LCD monitors use twisted nematic displays because they're cheap, but TN monitors can't produce anything resembling colours accurately, which is essential for someone working with graphics. There's so much crap wrong with them here's a link for more information.

Having worked with LCD monitors before and getting very bad headaches and eye strain from looking at them I can say that avoiding one at all costs is par for the course of looking for a replacement. An interesting question arises: if LCD monitors are so horrible how did they come to dominate the market? The answer is simple, and comes in two parts:

1. They're smaller! Now marketing geniuses realise that the average consumer can't find his bunghole with both hands. A little trick, like calling a war "kinetic military action", can sway a lot of idiots for something that they would normally despise. The people who make computer monitors decided to rely on the fact that LCDs are a lot lighter than CRTs so consumers are willing to give up a product that is superior in every way for some POS because they won't get a hernia having to perform heavy lifting. LCDs are also thinner so you can put a lot more clutter on your work station and pay attention to it instead of doing your job.

2. They're cheaper to manufacture. CRTs require technology and components and things to manufacture. There's an X-ray gun, and leaded glass, and a high vacuum, and lots of other stuff. LCDs are just plastic and wires. Also, since the image "quality" is so shitty on LCDs the company can save a lot of money by making loads of them and phasing out their more expensive, high quality CRT monitors.

If LCDs are the problem, what's the solution? Well, it's not impossible to find CRTs floating around, probably in the "Beyond" section of Bed, Bath, & Beyond, or The Twilight Zone, or the Internet, although in eight more years when that one breaks I'll have to get some POS LCD, right? Well, that article linked above (and again here) talks about in-plane switching (IPS) LCD monitors that are much more expensive and much rarer but aren't all bad. Then there's the OLED or "organic" light-emitting diode, which, according to the other wiki, can procuce comparable image quality to CRTs for about $3000 a unit! I'll keep you informed on this unfolding saga. Next time see pictures of the deceased.

Buddha Loves That Mean Green

2011-11-21T00:47:00.005-05:00

By which I mean money, not weed (although Shiva would care to disagree).

At current gold prices Buddha's net worth is estimated at $30,4367,085 - not bad for a guy who lived as a wandering ascetic for 51 years.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump continues to Think Big and Kick Ass at $2.7 billion.

Up at UD is a story about the difference between Buddhist meditators (yo) and ordinary mortals. Whereas an ordinary mortal would only accept a crappy gift from a rich friend 25% of the time, a Buddhist meditator would accept the same crappy gift 50% of the time. The reason, according to the article, is that meditation changes the way the brain works so people use reason instead of emotion. A reasonable person would think "hey, better than nothing," whereas an emotional person would think "son of a bitch could afford more, screw their gift!"

It's a short story and that's pretty much all it says.

Stupid Economists

2011-11-17T01:08:00.003-05:00

Niall Ferguson is at it again. If you recall, previously he warned that the Muslim Brotherhood would take over Egypt and the lives of the Egyptian people would be much less free and suck much more post Mubarak. He was right. Now he's saying that government spending won't save the economy, it will make it worse. The way to prevent catastrophic collapse is to overhaul the bloated tax code. He uses Republican Paul Ryan's plan as an example of what needs to be done. The video is four minutes long. Enjoy.

The Games We Play

2011-11-16T17:22:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid I often thought life was like a video game. Everything seemed contrived and I set out to have fun playing it. Now I spend less time focusing on what, in 2006, I called "The Game of Life," but the thought does periodically come to mind, as it has at this 3 AM listening to the rain outside my window. Now, while I am not suggesting that the purpose of life is a game, that we are here to play, the case can be made that, fundamentally, that statement is accurate. It seems to me that there are many, many levels to the Game of Life.

In 2008 I was drawn to the notion that, like it or not, and most of the time it is not, we are always playing and never living from a position of authenticity. We are never living from a position of the true self, but instead are always putting on masks and hiding from the truth.

We are always lying, all the time, even, and I would say especially, with ourselves about who we are. We create a series of intersubjective rules where certain actions, behaviours, mannerisms, appearances, styles of dress, professions, and patterns of consumption will define us as a "winner" and other actions etc., will define us as a "loser." We are always trying to win this game we are playing with other people and with ourself. It may get us somewhere and there may be some temporary benefits to playing this game, but the real effect is seen in the anxiety it creates; the sense of shame and inadequacy we feel, the depression, the anger, the confusion all from this drive toward inauthenticity. It is no surprise that we are the most heavily medicated people in all of history. We damage ourselves psychologically so much and we are taken to believe, through clever advertising, that the cause to our problems are external to our own minds (be they society, our brain, the 1%, etc.) that we become drug addicts and shell out loads of money to either the cartels or the government's favourite pharmaceutical companies, who are deeply in bed together and working to create a drugged society.

As a result of this game you do not have one self. You create a new persona for every person you interact with. There is the self you present to yourself, the self you present to me, the self you present to persons X, Y, and Z, etc. All of this is a fiction. It is a mechanism of avoiding the truth. Maybe we cannot cope with who we are, cannot accept who we are. We are too damaged and so we play hide and seek with ourself. We erect boundaries and hide everything we cannot stand about who we are and it is this lie that is fundamentally the source of our problems. We invest so heavily in maintaining the lie that the lie consumes us.

Life is a game and it is one that we play to avoid ourself. Now there are some people who have uprooted this lie and are living from authenticity and there are more who have tricked themselves into believing that they are being authentic, but this is just the smallest percentage of the population. Most people will never even become aware of the lie. They cannot handle the psychological shock. For those of us who are aware that we are playing there is a long road ahead to get out of the game. Meditation cannot free us because it ignores the lie completely. In samadhi there is nothing arising, including the lie, but once we come out we are right back in the same pattern of self-deception (which is why so many great Eastern masters came to the West and became entangled in problems with drugs, money, or sex: they were fine in the ashram where no temptation existed, but back in society where temptation abounds they have no psychological mechanism for dealing with it. It's a lot like the alcoholic who doesn't deal with alcohol, he just avoids it. Avoiding temptation is not the same as overcoming it.). We have a Shadow, and that is what Western psychotherapy works on. We must integrate East and West to uproot the lie and start living from authenticity.

11.11.11

2011-11-11T11:11:00.000-05:00

It comes once every century (twice if you're using a 12 hour clock!): 11:11:11 on 11/11/11. In under 5 minutes I talk about the end of the First World War, the experience and value of the soldier, and what we can learn from them and from history.

P.S. The video was shot on 11 November, and posted here on the 12 @ 1:31 AM, but the time stamp has been changed to reflect the theme of the post.

Happy Birthday Baby 7 Billion

2011-11-08T20:15:00.003-05:00

31 October 2011 was officially declaired the Day of Seven Billion by the UN (given a 12 month margin of error!). While no one can know who exactly the seven billionth person is one group chose this girl from India to protest the killing of baby girls in that part of the world. If you've been following this series you'll know that there are 7 men in China for every woman, which is why the Chinese economy will collapse before the end of the century. The situation is better in India and other Asian countries, but still highly problematic.

The Chinese government celebrates the grisly fact that their one child policy has resulted in the "elimination" of 400 million people since it was instituted, making it more devastating than the Black Death (150 million); both World Wars combined (80 million); Hitler, Stalin, Chingis Khan, and Timur combined (110 million); and falls in the middle of the estimated deaths from Smallpox (300-500 million). Fuck you China, fuck you very much.

Europe Dies

2011-11-05T23:57:00.002-04:00

Like the Oracle says in the last Matrix film "everything that has a beginning has an end." Seems as if the end has come for the Eurozone (I'm on the record as of May 2008 saying that the Euro sucks and that the success of the Eurozone is a fiction that is artificially propped up by government intervention). Greece, the very place where all this started in 2010 when the world went mad, has crystalised into a stone that is dragging the entire Eurozone with it into destruction.

The very government of Greece is teetering on the edge, their military being decapitated for unknown reasons. Billions around the world were wiped out in the markets as fears of a coup arose. According to the story one Greek official (unnamed) is on the record as saying "It’s all over. The government is about to collapse."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pissed at how Germany is carrying the weight of the Eurozone and its endemic bailouts of all the failed countries. Pussies in Greece (which used to be the toughest bunch of people on the planet, producing the Spartans, Socrates, Alexander the Great, and Plotinus, all while wearing skirts no less, before turning into the biggest welfare state on the planet) have made Merkel as Hitler posters because she is the only sane leader in the EU and realises that this whole EU experiment in keeping something huge and complicated going as long as possible for no other reason that to justify the fact that it is very expensive and has been going on for a long time.

From The Independent: "The international economy is on the brink of a deep new economic crisis that could cost millions of jobs around the globe and trigger mass social unrest.... The UN agency warned that it could take until 2016 for global employment to return to the levels of three years ago – and that anger could erupt on the streets of Europe and other continents as a result."

If the Greeks were right (the classical Greeks, not the modern ones) and madness is contagious, and 2011 has been very good evidence that it is, we could be looking at something much worse than the end of the Eurozone. I don't like speculating about these sorts of things, but maybe the Mayans were right and the world will end in 2012. Not from some natural cataclysm, but from humanity's own hubris.

Integral Politics II

2011-10-29T22:44:00.007-04:00

Remember Integral Politics and the promise of Integral Politics II that eventually morphed into Why Study History? Two days ago I shot 31 minutes of video that could be called the sequel to Integral Politics. In 9 sections I look at the Left/Right dichotomy, the foresight of the founders, libertarians, why communism never works, what can be learned from listening to different perspectives, and political movements and how they are coopted. Divided into three parts.

Part One
Left & Right & Everything Inbetween
Why Communism Doesn't Work
  Other Wiki's Page on Plymouth
  Hub Page on Plymouth
Equally Wrong Equally Right?
As Much Government as is Necessary
  In case you're wondering "the others" after Voltaire is Jean Jacques Rousseau, who had at least four illigitimate children.

Part Two
Changing Social Identities
  The two functions of religion: "legitimacy" and "authenticity." The legitimacy that religion provides "has historically been the single greatest "social glue" that any culture has." From Ken Wilber's"Spirituality that Transforms"originally published in What Is Enlightenment? magazine.
  "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
  It's not known if Einstein actually said this or not. Apocryphal though it may be, the sentiment is accurate.
Declining Religion & Handouts
  Religious people are more charitable than secular people, including giving to non-religious charities.
  From the Hoover Institute, 2003: Religious people are 25 percentage points more likely than secularists to donate money and 23 points more likely to volunteer time.
  Psychology Today, 2009

Part Three
Less Government = More People Helped?
The Genius of the Founders
  Medical uses for marijuana (cannabis)
Tea Parties and Occupy Wherever
  Student loan debt from USA Today

This Is A Story About A Whale

2011-10-26T01:28:00.003-04:00

Darwinists say that the whale is the best example of evolution in action. The whale started out as a bear, or cat, or hyena, or hippo, depending on who you ask. Over time fossils were found and the people who run the museums drew flippers and flukes where none were discovered, and added arrows that were never found to demonstrate how whales evolved from creatures that are now acknowledged to not be whale ancestors. This makes you think, if the whale is the BEST example of evolution how did the idea ever get off the drawing board and into the outdated highschool text books?

Video runs 9 min.

Whale Evolution vs. The Actual Fossil Evidence from Philip Cunningham on Vimeo.

Why Dawkins Doesn't Debate Craig

2011-10-23T16:10:00.003-04:00

Dick-to-the-Dawk-to-the-PhD won't debate William Lane Craig because he's scared there's a huge likelihood that he'll lose, but instead makes up fake reasons like: "I'll only debate members of the Church establishment and not professional debaters," and "Craig believes in genocide because he's a Christian." Other atheists are calling Dawk out on being a pussy. This guy (don't know who) posted two videos showing Craig destroy Dawk's fellow nay-theists Peter Atkins and Sam Harris with the remark "I think the real reason for Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig is plain enough to see."

Here are the videos below:

Atkins

Harris

The Pussification of America

2011-10-19T18:20:00.004-04:00

George Carlin did a routine on what he called "the pussification of America," a condition brought on by too much politically correct BS. I got to thinking in the shower, where I do most of my thinking. It started with the obvious paradox: nearly everyone in the country is on some diet all of the time and is more "health-conscious" than ever, yet a full third of all our citizens are obese. Never have I seen this many fat people in my life, and this is in spite of the fact that no one is allowed to eat salt or trans fats, or carbs, or meat, or whole milk. How the hell are they getting that fat then? Do people assume that since food is now low fat that they can eat ten times more?

This reminded me of something in the book Generation Kill. One of the Marines was a Mexican who liked to go off about how he disliked white people even though all his friends were white. He made a good point when he said that being poor in America was different than being poor elsewhere. Poor people in America have a house, or at least an apartment, a car or two, plasma TV, high-speed Internet, iPhone, iPod, i-whatever else, HD digital camera, etc. Also, poor people in America are obese. Poor people elsewhere are walking skeletons, like in Ethiopia on those Feed the Children commercials, but poor people in America are obese! How does that happen?

When you think about it, for 99% of human history only the tippity top of society could afford to get obese; less than 1%. The poorest people in America are obese, which puts them at the top richest 1% of all people in all of human history. Think about this: Louis XIV of France, the God-Emperor of all the world who built the largest palace on the continent and bathed in champaign and dressed in solid gold never used a toilet. His entire life, Louis XIV, the richest, most powerful man in all of Europe never used a toilet. He had to shit in a box and have someone dump it out a window. Louis XIV didn't have refrigiration in the summer, he didn't have heat in the winter, he didn't have a cure for measles. He had no electricity or motor vehicles. He had no means of keeping famine or war or plague from devastating his country. Louis XIV, the absolute ruler over millions, didn't live as well as poor people do in 21st Century America!

In spite of all this, the pussies at Occupy Wall Street* are still complaining! They claim to be the voice of the 99% against the top 1%, yet they are the top 1%! The people occupying Wall Street are among the top 1% of richest people in all of human history! They got used to getting a free ride from their bottomless mommy-government and when the tap got turned down slightly they started throwing a tantrum. They all have iPhones and iPads and HD digital cameras. They all have adequate nutrition (weren't they eating smoked salmon in their tents?). They have one of the best sanitation systems in human history, no threat of war now that there's an all volunteer military defending a nation protected on two sides by oceans. They have the best healthcare system on the planet, the one responsible for every last major medical advancement in the past thirty years. Think about it. The OWS pussies have it better than my ancestors did when they came to this country 100 years ago to escape being peasant farmers in Italy. There's child labour laws, civil rights, gay rights, womens' rights, free education till your 18th birthday, food stamps so poor people don't go hungry, indoor flush toilets, vaccines that save millions of children from previously fatal diseases that have vanished in the Western world. Hundreds of pages can be written about all the blessings these pussies have and only a couple on the troubles they face, yet they still are not satisfied! The selfishness of these people, shitting in police cars, mating under tarps, trying to keep a third of all employed New Yorkers from working**, assaulting the police to provoke retaliation and win sympathy like wife-beater Rodney King. The selfishness of the OWS pussies is disgusting.

*A group of activists believing that by yelling loudly enough some slogans they don't fully understand about some economic concepts they don't even begin to comprehend, they can change an economic situation they don't really like into a better one that they haven't quite defined yet.

**A third of all people in NYC are employed in some fashion by Wall Street.

An Incident at a McDonalds

2011-10-18T21:06:00.004-04:00

Okay, there's some harpy shouting "STOP!" throughout the video, but ignore her.

Basically a very rowdy customer (a colossal bitch) berrated a McDonalds' cashier for some minor mistake, hit him, jumped the counter and he ran. He returns with a whup-ass stick (it looks like a crowbar) and does something to her her parents forgot to do. Her bitch friend jumps the counter too and she gets what's coming as well. Absolutely, the man was defending himself and the customers got what they deserved. Cashiers take way too much shit from way too many assaholic customers as is. These two bitches went too far and the cashier went Michael Douglass in Falling Down on their asses. Of course the cashier was charged with felony assault. REGARDLESS of his background (he did kill someone once and paid his debt) his actions were self-defense and completely justified. Guaran-damn-tee if the two customers were MEN this wouldn't even be a news story, but because they were women and we live in a gynocracy the big bad man has to be punished. Boo hoo, call the wambulance. Watch the video below and see the whacks of justice being delivered in the name of every cashier who is abused by customers.

Zombie Muhammad

2011-10-15T23:43:00.002-04:00

Atheists attending a Halloween parade in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania* encountered trouble from the religion of "peace" (actually it's "piece" as in what they cut you up into if you piss them off, but it's a homophone and often gets misspelled). An atheist dressed as zombie Muhammad was harassed then brutally attacked by one or more peace-loving Muslims who wanted to kill him for being an infidel. It should be noted that none of the evil, Zionist, great Satan Catholics standing around attacked the atheist dressed as the zombie Pope who was looking for little boys to rape, just the peace-loving Muslims. Only two atheists actually attended the parade, which technically makes this the second smallest parade ever (Miles Gloriosus IS a parade, and he's just one guy!). I guess atheists (or Pennsylvanians?) don't like Halloween, which is cool; I don't care for it much either. It's like the welfare holiday.

Let me school you on the First Ammendment. This is America, not Persia where homosexuals are murdered, not Saudi Arabia where it is illegal for anyone who is not a Muslim to be a citizen of the country. America is a secular nation with secular laws that say: "you do not have the right to not be offended." If you don't like that, go fuck yourself. You don't have the right to replace US law with Sharia law.

Below is the video of the event.

*The place vampires come from.

7 Billion People Part Two

2011-10-09T15:41:00.004-04:00

Robert Kunzig writing for National Geographic has put out a decent article on the approaching birth of human number 7 billion. Decent because, while it says that poverty is the real problem, not population, and that Malthusian alarmism is nuts, it does toe the party line on globa-oops! "Climate Change" (hide the decline)*. The article is two pages (there's a little "continue" button at the bottom). Some gems include:

"THE ANNUAL meeting of the Population Association of America (PAA) is one of the premier gatherings of the world’s demographers. Last April the global population explosion was not on the agenda. “The problem has become a bit passé,” Hervé Le Bras says. Demographers are generally confident that by the second half of this century we will be ending one unique era in history—the population explosion—and entering another, in which population will level out or even fall.

But will there be too many of us? At the PAA meeting, in the Dallas Hyatt Regency, I learned that the current population of the planet could fit into the state of Texas, if Texas were settled as densely as New York City. The comparison made me start thinking like Leeuwenhoek. If in 2045 there are nine billion people living on the six habitable continents, the world population density will be a little more than half that of France today. France is not usually considered a hellish place. Will the world be hellish then? "

and

"But one can also draw a different conclusion—that fixating on population numbers is not the best way to confront the future. People packed into slums need help, but the problem that needs solving is poverty and lack of infrastructure, not overpopulation. Giving every woman access to family planning services is a good idea—“the one strategy that can make the biggest difference to women’s lives,” Chandra calls it. But the most aggressive population control program imaginable will not save Bangladesh from sea level rise, Rwanda from another genocide, or all of us from our enormous environmental problems."

*Because the earth hasn't warmed since 1998. In fact, the global temperature has decreased, markedly, since then. More than half of the climate stations in Siberia had to be ignored because they showed cooling, not warming, while climate stations on airport tarmacs and near heat exhaust vents were given "Mike's Nature Trick" to make it look like the earth was heating up. Seriously, after Climategate, if you still believe that humans are changing the climate you're a fucking retard, in plain English.

Freedom of Smoking

2011-10-08T15:38:00.004-04:00

Have you noticed that, for several years, the government has been trying to take away our freedom of smoking? Just because I elect not to exercise this, I'm going to call it a privilege, that does not mean that I am not still irked by the grotesque actions the government is taking with regard to smoking. Cigarette prices grow ever higher - twice, or more, the price of a gallon of gasoline, a far larger quantity of a far more useful commodity. Where before smoking was permitted everywhere, the non-smokers relegated to some paltry, isolated, ill-fashioned areas, now the roles have been reversed. That is not to say I am not happy with the new arrangements at resturants. Putting the non-smoking section in the back, accessible only through the smoking section, seemed to defeat the purpose of having separate sections at all. I'm glad, thrilled even, that I no longer come home having to shower and wash my clothes, but couldn't they just switch the locations and relegate the smokers to the oft forgotten back room, away from the entertainment and exits?

I'm glad for the waiters, already a thankless profession (ruined by Starbucks - whose coffee tastes foul, I might add, and is rather pricey - who ask for tips for their "baristas" when I could just as easily pour my own; now with everyone expecting a gratuity the gesture has forever lost its meaning, a gift for exceptional service, and has become just another bill), who no longer have to breathe the foul clouds of their patrons every day. Still, glad as I may be, this never was about me but about all of us. The problems I had were not with smoking but with courtesy and that is something that cannot be legislated.

You can't smoke in bars, you can't smoke in parks, you can't smoke in cars if children are present - a caveat some try to push on smoking in your own home! More and more there are fewer and fewer places to light up these ever more expensive things. Campaigns are being waged to replace the Surgeon General's warnings (the Surgeon General is technically an admiral) with pictures of dead people. Not just dead people, but putrid, puss oozing, zombie-like dead people, to scare consumers away from cigarettes. I'm pretty sure most smokers know the risks involved with their passtime; you don't have to rub it in.

Some people want to smoke. Some people never have any serious health effects from years of lighting up. Their habit hurts no one and benefits the government millions of dollars in taxes. Why work so hard to kill the golden goose? Why shift from one extreme of everywhere unlimited smoking to the other extreme of no smoking anywhere? Why not, as the Buddha would say, persue the middle way? A way of common sense, common courtesy, and maturity with regard to smoking? $8 per pack is bad enough. Can we at least stop pushing tax payers who already have nowhere to go by letting them enjoy their tax paying hobby without bankrupting them? Can't we have just a little more freedom of smoking?

7 Billion People

2011-10-05T06:50:00.002-04:00

The Earth's population will soon reach seven billion, but that really means the population growth rate is slowing.

60 Things I've Learned from the Movie "Megafault"

2011-09-29T07:32:00.006-04:00

1. Earthquake killed ten miners instantly but took its time to chase the foreman, even waiting for him to get in his truck
2. An earthquake movie is sponsored by Quaker Oatmeal
3. Earthquake in Kentucky knocked over the Washington Monument but none of the windows in Washington shattered and nothing in the hundreds of miles between the two places were damaged
4. Earthquakes don't "move" and they don't have "paths"
5. When the foreman is rescued from his truck five hours later he can still run faster than anyone else even though he hasn't moved that whole time
6. After the foreman is rescued the earthquake comes back and chases him some more
7. Earthquake tries to suck a helicopter from the sky
8. Only buildings in the "path" of the earthquake get destroyed, all surrounding buildings are spared
9. Earthquake can toss a car like a toy in a wind tunnel but can't even shake the people trying to outrun it on foot
10. Buildings break into large jagged pieces like in children's drawings
11. When planes lose contact with the control tower they immediately crash because they're "flying blind" even on perfectly cloudless days
12. The earthquake is very slowly moving across the United States and will split it in half
13. Earthquakes do not work that way
14. When planes lose contact with the control tower the "transponder" causes the engines to explode, even though they're not connected and a transponder is just a radio transmitter and you can turn it off with no ill effects to the plane
15. A satellite from 1989 has a beam that can instantly freeze the water table of an area, causing an earthquake, somehow
16. "Megafault" is the least accurate movie ever
17. "Megafault" is the most cornball movie ever
18. Earthquakes can chase things with fireballs
19. "Stop the truck!" "I can't there's an earthquake on our tail!"
20. Government building is built on a "gyroscope" so earthquakes can't get in
21. The people who made "Megafault" (The Asylum) don't know what words mean or how anything works
22. "Megafault" is less accurate than the movie where an electric demon brought a black hole to earth ("The Black Hole" 2006)
23. There's only one seismologist in the world and she's the main character
24. The only things that can stop an earthquake are another earthquake or the Grand Canyon because it's already a hole in the ground so it absorbs earthquakes
25. A helicopter can outrun a laser
26. Earthquakes are only as fast as whoever they chase
27. When a laser shuts off the beam sucks back in
28. Thermodynamics means nothing in the world of "Megafault"
29. "P-waves have dissipated to 40" doesn't mean anything
30. Earthquakes can be frozen
31. A geologist said "mantle, what mantle" even though he's 60 years old and should know the earth has a mantle by now
32. Destabilizing the mantle with an ice laser causes people to spontaneously combust, leaving all their clothes unsinged.
33. An ice laser can set off a volcano
34. SyFy movies are ~~even~~ much worse than SciFi movies
35. "Why can't we move the Grand Canyon?"
36. One miner created an entire series of interconnected coal mines in Wyoming
37. Coal mines do not work that way
38. It is possible for one team, given only two hours, to fill 35 mines with a few crates of explosives and create a canyon
39. Earthquakes like to follow certain people and kill others who just appear in one scene instantly
40. "You can't outrun these explosives" but he can outrun five earthquakes in one day
41. 20 million tons of TNT
42. 20 million tons of TNT looks like a few small crates
43. Earthquakes really hate certain people
44. "Megafault" ends with a satellite image of a hundred mile deep split in the country
45. In movies redemption = death
46. In "Megafault" redemption = death
47. To make up for his crappy life the foreman had to die to save the world
48. The Asylum made "Megafault"
49. The Asylum made "Megafault" so that explains but in no way excuses it
50. "Birdemic"
51. "Birdemic" is a zero-budget 2009 ripoff of "The Birds"
52. "Birdemic" is even worse than "Megafault"
53. The miner foreman is appropriately named Boomer
54. "Megafault" is a mockbuster of a made for TV movie "10.5"
55. Even though "the President" is mentioned throughout the first half of "Megafault" he never makes an apperance in the movie
56. The whole meeting "the President" theme of the first half hour of "Megafault" is mysteriously dropped and never mentioned again
57. The Asylum had to contact NASA to calculate how bad "Megafault" is
58. "Megafault" has more stupid things than "Paycheck"
59. Good actors are willing to perform in crap movies
60.

The Return of Harmony Part 2 (of 3)

2011-09-25T00:44:00.004-04:00

Not really, but it should have been. As a five part series finale this could have been the most awesome thing ever, but as a two part season premier, not so much. One hour of material was crammed into 22 minutes of show and with predictable results. The most powerful villain in the world was defeated in a deus ex machina way and turned back into stone as if that were the default setting of the Elements of Harmony.

Luna didn't appear (although Derpy was in the crowd at Canterlot). She was banished for 1000 years, but that wasn't punishment enough, so she was banished for the rest of Season One and the start of Season Two - the most siginficant event in the history of Equestria. Some ponies can't catch a break. She and Celestia just sat by and did nothing while Discord was on the loose? They could have at least helped (in a way other than returning Twi's letters).

If Twi could use her magic to undo Discord's negative effects on her friends why didn't she do so in the beginning? It would have been better if they had to overcome their changes with at least some struggle, if not two additional episodes worth. Part one seemed to be building up for something that never happened.

Now that the Mane 6 defeated Discord who would ever oppose them? They've only saved the very fabric of reality, they should be heaped with praise, their every whim delivered. You want everything for free for the rest of your life? No problem, you only saved reality. How could they possibly get repaid? I'm actually disappointed by this turn of events. Where do you possibly go from here?

The whole Cutie Mark Crusaders subplot was never resolved. It was just dropped like one of Discord's many non sequiturs. Were they there to demonstrait something? Were they there to serve as foreshadowing? Did their petty arguing actually free Discord? The world may never know.

This episode tried to be the greatest thing ever but was left wanting.

That's not to say this episode was bad, merely rushed. I would have to give this episode a comparatively low rating of 9.0 (out of 10.0). Not bad, like Over a Barrel, but not fantastic like Suited for Success or The Cutie Mark Chronicles.

Some very good parts of this episode include:

*Derpy was there, although she wasn't derping
*EVERYTHING about Discord
*Mean Fluttershy standing up to mean Pinkie Pie (at least somepony did it)
*Twi's balloon is back!
*When Discord fills the glass with chocolate milk he fills it from the top down, then drinks the glass and throws the glass-shaped milk away! And it blows up!
*The way Discord sits on his throne (see top picture)
*Twi handing out all the EoH necklaces and when she comes to her own she calls it a "big crown thing"
*Spike is the new Rainbow Dash
*Applejack eating apple cores and they get more complete with every bite
*When the Mane 6 originally attacked Discord with the EoH he puts a bullseye on his chest
*When they attack Discord the second time he says "friend me"
*Discord saying to Twi "Maybe the magic of friendship can help you."

There Can Be NO Peace with Israel...

2011-09-22T20:27:00.002-04:00

...Until the Palestinians stop rejecting it, as they have done habitually since the very beginning. The only solution to the Palestinian problem is for the Palestinians themselves to give up their asinine, historically false, and genocidal goal of gaining everything "from the river to the sea."

Palestine to UN: "No Jews Allowed"

2011-09-20T03:59:00.004-04:00

The South Syrians (Palestinians) are going to the UN, at the same time as Zero, whose very presence is closing down the city at the cost of millions, where they will be arguing for the existence of their state. Much like a child's club house the Palestinian state is posting a huge sign on their border: "NO JEWS ALLOWED".
Runs 11:13

Marine Sergeant - A True Hero

2011-09-19T04:02:00.005-04:00

On 15 September the President awarded Marine Sergeant Dakota Meyer the Medal of Honor for saving the lives of 36 of his brothers in arms. He disobeyed orders and entered an Afghan kill zone five times to save the lives of 13 Americans and 23 Afghanis, as well as recover the bodies of 4 of his friends. This is truly moving. Words cannot do justice to his brave deeds.

The Return of Harmony

2011-09-17T22:54:00.003-04:00

Today was the long awaited premier of season two of FiM, and we got to meet the awesome villain Discord and learn that Equestria follows the same basic rules as most creation myths.

If we recall #69 on the list: Celestia needs the Elements of Harmony to defeat her sister, so even though she's older she's the weaker of the two.

From this we can know the following: (101.) Since both Celestia and Luna together needed the Elements of Harmony to defeat Discord, that makes Discord the de facto most powerful being ever introduced on the show. Not only did he precede the sisters as ruler of the world, he also held that position since deep antiquity and is possibly the oldest being yet introduced.

Next is the issue of the Elements of Harmony themselves. Who or what created them, or have they always existed?

The story presented in today's episode is one with a great deal of staying power. The world exists from an infinite past in chaos; out of the chaos are born the gods, the gods do battle with a great dragon, slay it, and then build the world from its remains. A lot of ancient myths follow this pattern with only slight variation (the Babylonian story of creation with Marduk fighting Tiamat follows it directly; the Greek Theogony details how the gods came from the premordial chaos: Kronos defeated his father Uranus, bringing about a golden age like when Celestia and Luna ruled together, then he overstepped his bounds and Zeus defeated him, like when Luna became Nightmare Moon and had to be defeated by her sister). This chaoskampf (conflict with chaos) appears throughout a very large number of the world's creation stories (including the Bible where, in Job, God tells Job how he fought Behemoth and Leviathan at the time of creation, trapped them, and how they will be destroyed in the eschaton, like how Discord was fought and trapped in stone, though we don't know if there was ever the intent on destroying him at the end of time), and plays out rather nicely in The Return of Harmony.

My only problem with this episode is that it is only a two-parter. I could stand to watch a separate episode dealing with how Discord affects each of the mane six. He is insanely powerful and insanely cool and I don't think two episodes do him much justice.

Asymmetric Warfare, Afghans, and Aliens

2011-09-16T02:32:00.003-04:00

People say the Soviet Union and United States lost in Afghanistan and Vietnam, respectively, because of asymmetric warfare. This is not true in either circumstance.

Russia succeeded in its goals in Afghanistan and left the country because they had more pressing concerns elsewhere. The pro-Soviet Afghan government faired very well for several years after the Soviet withdrawl in 1989, the Mujahideen had largely been crushed by 1986 when the Soviets began to leave, allowing the Mujahideen to return from Pakistan, and the Soviets learned valuable lessons from testing new field tactics. 1 million Afghans were killed, 2 million internally displaced, and 5 million fled to Pakistan and Persia, and all at the cost of 15,000 Soviet troops.

The United States never set out to win the war in Vietnam in the traditional sense. US goals involved defending the South from communist invasion. US forces could have invaded Hanoi, destroyed the DVR and left the VC to wither away after having the support kicked from under them, but Washington saw the risk of escalation with China as too great and decided to play small ball and eventually pull out, never having been defeated on the field.

The lessons learned from the Soviet-Afghan War and the Vietnam War can be applied to an hypothetical alien invasion of the earth to understand why asymmetrical warfare against extaterrestrials is doomed to fail.

Runs 12:30

Exploring the Near Death Experience

2011-09-13T22:44:00.007-04:00

Someone called TheSurvivalIndex has put out a 15 minute video detailing the cultural phenomena associated with the NDE. He says three main groups of people form the bulk of the popular presentation on the NDE:
1. Fundamentalist Christians,
2. New Age Haberdashers, and
3. Fundamaterialist Skep-Dicks.
Group 1 latches on to the pro-Fundamentalist Christian NDEs as proof of their beliefs and ignores or even denigrates NDEs that are favourable to other religions or to no religions at all (like atheists who have NDEs that tell them part of their life's mission is to be an atheist). Group 2 extrapolates from the NDE to believe all sorts of stuff that most likely is untrue (Loch Ness Monster, Fairies, Vampires, etc.*) and often tries to profit large offering spurious services to unknowledgable people. Group 3 likes to come up with bullshit just-so stories to explain away the NDE because they are committed to materialism, even when those stories blatantly ignore real facts, are based on illogic, and other fundamaterialists disagree and tear apart opposing stories. All three groups are able to thrive because the general populous doesn't actually read the primary material - actual NDE accounts and the reports of NDE investigators. Even though all three groups are contradicted by the evidence that doesn't bother them because as long as the vast majority of people are ignorant of that evidence they can still come off looking like authority figures.

*I'm not necessarily saying things like the Loch Ness Monster and fairies are not real - they may be - but I have looked into the topics and can't really find any good evidence for them. Loch Ness almost certainly can't support a single large creature, let alone a breeding population. There were biosonar signals detected in Lake Champlain though, indicating that, while not a "monster" there has to be a freshwater equivalent of a cetacean, something that has never before been seen. Things like fairies, gnomes, and other little people stretch my credulity a might, but they may have something to do with some spiritual force, I don't know and am open to the possibility. Vampires, either corpses reanimated by evil spirits (as the original vampires were), people infected with a virus that compells them to drink blood, or these psychic vampires who are real people who claim to drain people's energy in some way they never quite explain, are probably one of the least likely of these "paranormal" phenomena. If vampires reproduce like zombies there should have been a "vampire" apocalypse by now. The vampires in the Blade movies kept changing to suit the story and the Underworld vampires were never really explained very well, so I don't know how they stayed in hiding all these centuries. Psychic vampirism appears to be a lifestyle choice, like hippies or bikers other such groups, and probably aren't vampires at all, although they get happiness from playing a role. There are people who are difficult or depressed or assaholic and drain your energy that way, but there's nothing "paranormal" about that.

9/11: Ten Years Later

2011-09-11T20:31:00.005-04:00

9/11 remains one of the four most significant days in my life (and the only one that didn't happen in a short period between 2005-6). I remember exactly where I was ten years ago. I remember the innocence of the age and the girl at school I paid more attention to than the lessons. I remember the palpable dread that hung over everything. I remember the conversations, the denial, the grim disbelief. I remember having to learn to draw a new New York skyline. I remember how everyone was drawn into patriotism and brotherhood then quickly sunk back into the tick-tock of everyday life. I remember all the freedom I've had to give up. I remember the conversations with "truthers" and all their dreck, listening to people balancing between green and red reproach Capital Bush with the obsession of an alcoholic, ruining even what should have been their own dining experiences (I did attend university once). I remember the scenes of people jumping from buildings, now forever burned into my memory. I remember anger, confusion, sadness, government ineptitude at finding a single man, who was eventually caught and killed and dumped at sea with no proof given to the people who waited a decade for that day and to the country's enemies to serve as a warning.
Damn.
What a decade.

Swami Kriyananda on the Economic Collapse

2011-09-10T03:54:00.003-04:00

Recall earlier how I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Paramhansa Yogananda's disciple Kriyananda's world brotherhood colonies, dubbed "Ananda Villiages", were neither hippie nor communist. Everyone must be fiscially responsible and contribute financially to the community. Now Swami Kriyananda gives an hour talk on the global economic collapse. In summary:

*Using creative energy to help others is like a muscle - it gets stronger the more you use it - and not like a fixed quantity like gold that diminshes the more you use it

*A lot of people care only for money, not for people, and they often play the stock market

*Government is too damn big (though he doesn't say "damn")

*Welfare helps government orders of magnitude more than it helps the needy

*...And it's FDR's fault!

*Deficite spending doesn't work and is killing the world economy

*"Legalise pot and maybe hard drugs so criminals can't make profits off of it and addicts can be given help, not rectal exams

*(Interestingly) Rock music (especially metal) is the vibration of negative dimensions and can cause natural disasters!

*Kindness and generosity can shelter you from economic hardship, though not always immediately, and, consequently, if you apply for enough jobs you'll eventually get one

*The Dollar will collapse, leading to world-wide hyperinflation

*The Euro sucks (too)

*Gold coins are very good to survive the economic apocalypse, but good farm land is the best investment

*Starting small communities in the country with similar minded individuals is the key to saving humanity, because cities will explode with apocalyptic crime

Eros/Thanatos Concept Cover

2011-09-06T01:12:00.002-04:00

Here's the second version of what will become the cover to Eros/Thanatos.

The Son I Should Have Had

2011-09-05T22:31:00.002-04:00

The following is intended to become an episode of The Urban Mystic Show (episode 302):

Twenty-six minutes into the movie Gladiator, the emperor Marcus Aurelius asks his general, Maximus, to become emperor following his death; to fulfill the one thing that he was unable to do. Marcus Aurelius says: "I will empower you to one end alone: to give power back to the people of Rome, and end the corruption that has crippled it." This request is problematic for several reasons, least of all having to do with the structure of the Roman senate itself.

First of all, to get the pesky problem with the senate out of the way as quick as possible, it should be noted that the senate of Rome did not function the way it is portrayed by the filmmakers. Senators were never elected by the people at all, they were appointed, and one had to be fairly wealthy in order to even be considered eligible for appointment. The senators did not represent the people of Rome at all, but a very minute group of elites at he very pinnacle of Roman society. Aside from having to endure the foul smell and terrible racket of chariot wheels on cobblestone streets of the city itself, senators really had nothing in common with the people. Returning the empire of Rome to a republic would not end the corruption – senators were always corrupt and looked out for their own potential benefit from political dealings – and it would certainly not give power back to the people because power never rested in the hands of the people to begin with.

More importantly, the very idea of handing power over to the people of Rome would be a profoundly stupid idea with extraordinarily disastrous results. One would expect Marcus Aurelius, the great Stoic philosopher whose Meditations are still quoted today, would have realized this. Of course, one cannot fault the emperor for this error; Ridley Scott appears to be crafting a vision of "Rome" that will appeal to the great idea of American of a government of the people, by the people, for the people, instead of creating something accurate that would be completely alien to a modern audience.

Just who is to be included under the banner of "the people of Rome?" Are the people of Mauritania and Moesia to be given equal say in the governing of the empire as the Latins themselves? Or is it just the people inhabiting the city itself that will rule, as a great many-headed tyrant over the vast conquered masses of the empire? At the rate it took to travel the vast spans of the empire anything more than the confines of the city would be too great a territory to permit any governance within a reasonable time frame. Should the Parthians invade it would be suicide to wait for the inhabitants of Britannia to decide whether to go to war or seek diplomatic means of crisis resolution.

The average Roman was preoccupied with more important matters, like securing food, and could not possibly have been educated in the finer points of governance. The average Roman was cold, hungry, illiterate, fearful. They desperately held on to their customs and traditions, their rituals and routines just to carve out mere subsistence. For as bad as the emperors were, as corrupt the senators, it was the people of Rome who were perhaps the worst possible choice as for who should rule. While Marcus Aurelius' vision makes for a wonderful story, and a wonderful picture of 21st century America, for second century Rome the idea would be absolutely nonsensical, and would be the farthest thing from Marcus Aurelius' mind.

The World Gone Mad: REDUX

2011-09-02T22:39:00.003-04:00

Remember the map from The World Gone Mad that displayed countries around the world where various social, economic, political, and military turmoil was going on? Well, someone has now made an interactive version of the map here with story and explanation here. The world gone mad map and the world opinion on intervention in Libya map are both interactive and updated since the one posted on The Urban Mystic back in February.

Milton Friedman on Donahue - 1979

2011-09-02T21:34:00.002-04:00

Economist Milton Friedman takes down Phil Donahue's appeal to emotion by pointing out that greed is not capitalism's fault but is a basic human condition plaguing all political and economic systems. 9:28

George Gilder Talking Straight

2011-09-01T02:12:00.001-04:00

George Gilder talks a whole lot of sense in this twenty minute Reason TV interview. This one is so good I'm actually going to watch it again tomorrow.

Honest Reporting's Life of Brian

2011-08-30T21:55:00.005-04:00

Honest Reporting does a two minute video in the style of Monty Python about all the things Israel did for peace that the media ignore. They also have a drawing for a two disc edition of Life of Brian if you're interested (free to enter).

Rumors of War II

2011-08-30T00:16:00.003-04:00

The Sequel. An hour long documentary. Between radical Islam, the Chicoms, and global economic collapse, the end of our way of life is near.

Ken Wilber on Ethics and Enlightenment

2011-08-29T00:00:00.000-04:00

From the same talk as yesterday's video. Practicing ethics cannot make you enlightened, but you cannot be enlightened without practicing ethics. Runs 9:22.

Ken Wilber on Morality

2011-08-28T04:22:00.001-04:00

Ken Wilber talks about morality and why it is the foundation of spiritual development. Runs 9 minutes.

Imagine No Religion

2011-08-28T02:29:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure John Lennon meant "no religion" to mean everyone should be an atheist. He was a lot smarter than that. Just looking at the most horrible acts of the twentieth century make the fact clear that atheism in its various guises (social Darwinism, communism, eugenics) caused more human suffering than anything else besides Smallpox. What I think he meant was that shouldn't have the fierce sectarian divisions that often come with religion. We have such gems of quotes from Lennon on religion as:

“People got the image I was anti-Christ or antireligion,” he said. “I’m not at all. I’m a most religious fellow. I’m religious in the sense of admitting there is more to it than meets the eye. I’m certainly not an atheist.”

He also didn't believe in Darwinism:

“Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way,” he insisted. “That’s another piece of garbage. What the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t’ve come from anything—fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into men now? It’s absolute garbage.”

Unfortunately people do misappropriate Lennon's music and his image. There are those who claim that religion is the root of all evil while ignoring all the good it does (what Ken Wilber calls the conveyor belt; I've also argued a lot about Christianity's integral role in ending slavery). Well, getting on topic, finally, here is the ultimate outcome of a society that has ditched religion, leveled off on flatland narcissism, and believes in nothing: the UK riots.

A country with cradle to craftmatic adjustable bed handouts, where no one has to work because they get government stipends, where everyone gets free (albeit very shitty) health care, could not help but explode when those handouts are taken away. The UK is broke so they decided to cut back on a pittance of the handouts so know-it-all teenagers dediced to smash stuff for no evident reason. Lots of buildings were destroyed and people killed (there may be racist elements involved). Of course you could say if people were allowed to own guns they could defend themselves, their families, and even total strangers, but the UK is ruled by a king (a queen actually; there won't be a king for a while), and kings love to have a control on the possession of weapons. Absent the ability to own guns, sales of baseball bats rose three hundred percent (my estimate) because everyone over 20 was afraid for their lives as know-it-all teenagers with immortality complexes destroyed everything insane.

The author, A. N. Wilson, has some brilliant points to make:

A Christian woman working for British Airways who wears a cross round her neck is asked to remove it for fear of offending other people. A nurse who prays with a patient in hospital is committing an almost criminal act. Catholic adoption agencies which disapprove of gay adoptive parents on religious grounds have their licences taken away.

And all the while, our governing classes and academics and teachers chip away at the fundamental truths of the great religions — truths that have stood the test of time for thousands of years — in their arrogant certainty that there are no moral absolutes and that the human race can make up the rules as it goes along.

At the nuttier fringes of the chattering classes there are those, like the geneticist Richard Dawkins and the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who actually believe that religion is a mental poison responsible for all the evils in the world.

The misguided and vacuous thinking of these so-called intellectuals is compounded by a sordid celebrity-culture which holds up role models who should be despised rather than admired.

Amy Winehouse, a pathetic drug-infused alcoholic girl of very modest talent, is held up as great diva; and when she died, her house was surrounded by fans, laying empty vodka bottles as a ‘tribute’.

What happens when you imagine a world with no religion? I don't have to imagine, I can just look across the pond to see how a society lacking morality and values is faling apart. How long before the madness comes to America? I don't know, but here's something I wrote a few months ago that may help:

In 2008 I said Obama would be like four more terms of Bush.
In 2009 I said I never imagined things could ever get this bad.
In 2010 I wished I was back in 2009.
In 2011 I said the world had gone mad.
Now I'm saying the world will not last till the end of 2012.

If we ever needed to heed Lennon's advice to "give peace a chance" now is that time.

Defending Plagiarism

2011-08-23T00:54:00.006-04:00

How can one possibly defend plagiarism? After all, isn't plagiarism that thing we learn all throughout school is the most horrible thing someone can possibly do? I point to history for its defense. For 99 percent of human history what we now call "plagiarism" was not only permitted, it was expected.

The Other Wiki says:

"The modern concept of plagiarism as immoral and originality as an ideal, emerged in Europe only in the 18th century, particularly with the Romantic movement. For centuries before, not only literature was considered "publica materies," a common property from which anybody could borrow at will, but the encouragement for authors and artists was actually to "copy the masters as closely as possible," for which the closer the copy the finer was considered the work. This was the same in literature, music, painting and sculpture. In some cases, for a writer to invent their own plots was reproached as presumptuous. This stood at the time of Shakespeare too, when it was common to appreciate more the similarity with an admired classical work, and the ideal was to avoid "unnecessary invention.""

It then goes on to say how the Romantics fucked this up, like they did with virtually everything.

The first newspapers were all plagiarised. One paper reported a story and all the others copied it. Ben Franklin, one of the greatest and most popular founding fathers (also one of the most important, as he secured the backing of France, without whose help America would never have won independence) was an unapologetic plagiarist.

A lot of the greatest writers in all of history were plaigarists. Homer certainly didn't come up with the Illiad and Odyssey, he was just the best at retelling them. Plato took most of his early works from his teacher Socrates. All the fairie tales and other oral stories passed down from deep antiquity were plagiarised by people like the Brothers Grimm. A good portion of the Declaration of Independence was plagiarised. My own work Black Listed is a parody of Scott Adams' book The Religion War that borrows heavily from the original (with the addition of singing).

Advances in science and technology have largely come from people copying something someone else invented. The Indians took Chinese bamboo rockets and encased them in iron, turning a novelty into a deadly weapon. The Arabs took the Indian Wootz steel and used it to conquer a vast empire under the name "Damascus Steel." The composite bow and the sabre came from Turkic peoples in the Altai region and were adapted by cultures around the world. Russia and the US took rocket technology from the Germans and China took it from Russia. Similarly, Russia took the atom bomb from the US and China took it from Russia (the communist Chinese are not capable of much original thought, having divorced themselves from 2000 years of their illustrious history).

Music? Most of the popular songs throughout history have been plagiarised. The Star-Spangled Banner was a plagiarised British drinking song and it became the national anthem, yet 200 years later The Verve take a lot less of some shitty Rolling Stones song (which was agreed they could!) to make something brilliant and that's a crime! Taking a whole song was fine in 1814 while taking part of a song is illegal in 1997? And the US Government not only SAYS it was fine in 1814, they adopt what today would be called a stolen song and make it the national anthem! Music became what it is today largely by sampling, which is plagiarism. You wouldn't have your rock and R&B without plagiarising the blues and Nergo spirituals. You wouldn't have rap, hip-hop, dance, funk, or a whole lot else without plagiarism.

I will go as far as to say that plagiarism built the world we have today as much as virtually anything else you can think of (capitalism, Christianity, the Enlightenment). To paraphrase Gordon Gecko, "plagiarism is good." Plagiarism is one of the best things to ever happen in human history and I proudly defend it.

PS - Steal this. Adapt this. Take this and use it as a tool to make your own contributions to human culture.

The Urban Assessment

2011-08-20T02:26:00.003-04:00

I just looked through all the tags (there are a lot) that appear at the bottom of every single post and link similar themed posts for easy reference. Some appear in only one post (An American Carol, Bible Code, Gary Schwartz, Military Hierarchy), largely appearing in early posts when I didn't know how often a particular topic would come up. Some rather important ones appear a few times (UFOs 9, Survival of Consciousness 9, Consciousness 9, Buddhism 7). A few interesting ones come up very often. Here is a list of all the tags that appear ten or more times:

10
Communism
Global Waffles
Jews
Mysticism
Psychokinesis

11
Bible
Church of Global Warming (the funniest of them all)
Fabricated Global Warming
Judaism

12
God
Politics (created just today, added retroactively to several posts)

13
Atheism
Israel
Perspective (some of the most diverse and interesting posts fall in this category)
Scientism
Terrorism

14
Liberal Racists
News
Religion

15
Barack Obama
Christianity
Hinduism
India

16
Uncommon Descent
Uri Geller
Warfare

18
Other (19 with this post; most tie in with Uri Geller and Forbidden Knowledge)
Philosophy

21
Fundamaterialism

23
Irked-Confusion Studios

28
2011 (that's a lot for one year, more than 2006 and 2008 combined)

35
History

38 (39)
The Urban Mystic (is 38 now, will be 39 once this is posted)

40
USA

43
REAL Science (was 34 in January)

Five Reasons I Like Rick Perry

2011-08-20T01:13:00.006-04:00

And two that don't really do it for me.
Note: my commentary will be in [square brackets]. The rest of the text is directly from the Yahoo News story.

1. Abolish lifetime tenure for federal judges by amending Article III, Section I of the Constitution.

[Couldn't agree more. Kings serve for life, and we fought two wars to rid ourselves of the yoke of a king (the Revolution and War of 1812, when Britain fought back). By giving the judges lifetime tenure it divorces them from reality and from the people, the concent of whom is from whence they derive their power.]

2. Congress should have the power to override Supreme Court decisions with a two-thirds vote.

[Maybe not a two-thirds vote, maybe something stronger, but nothing in government should be final. Even the Constitution can be amended, so should the Supreme Court, lest they become absolutist.]

3. Scrap the federal income tax by repealing the Sixteenth Amendment.

[Last year this was one of two BIG things I said needed to be done to fix the country. If not possible to achieve a repeal I did propose an alternate income tax scheme.]

4. End the direct election of senators by repealing the Seventeenth Amendment.

Overturning this amendment would restore the original language of the Constitution, which gave state legislators the power to appoint the members of the Senate.

Ratified during the Progressive Era in 1913 , the same year as the Sixteenth Amendment, the Seventeenth Amendment gives citizens the ability to elect senators on their own. Perry writes that supporters of the amendment at the time were "mistakenly" propelled by "a fit of populist rage."

"The American people mistakenly empowered the federal government during a fit of populist rage in the early twentieth century by giving it an unlimited source of income (the Sixteenth Amendment) and by changing the way senators are elected (the Seventeenth Amendment)," he writes.

[This is even more important than getting rid of the tax. When the Constitution was written it was decided that the two houses of Congress would be populated in two different ways: Representatives are chosen by the people and Senators are chosen by the state legislatures. This was one of the most brilliant decisions in all of world history. The whole point of the Constitution was to maximise the power of the States, but reign them in just enough so the Union could stick together, which wasn't possible under the Articles of Confederation. Representatives were elected by popular vote and each state got a number of Representatives proportional to total population, this way we the people get our say. Senators were chosen by the state legislatures and each state got two so that the power held by big states and small states would be equal where it really counted. Having Senators chosen by the state legislatures was a guarantee to states' rights. The Senators represented the will of the states whereas the Representatives represented the will of the people. This was a brilliant balancing act to protect everyone from each other. Then along came the populists who wanted to turn the United States into a mobocracy and changed the Constitution to say the Senators are elected by the people too, taking power away from the states and giving it to whoever had the deepest pockets and the Federal government, as the two are one and the same.]

5. Require the federal government to balance its budget every year.

Of all his proposed ideas, Perry calls this one "the most important," and of all the plans, a balanced budget amendment likely has the best chance of passage.

"The most important thing we could do is amend the Constitution--now--to restrict federal spending," Perry writes in his book. "There are generally thought to be two options: the traditional 'balanced budget amendment' or a straightforward 'spending limit amendment,' either of which would be a significant improvement. I prefer the latter . . . . Let's use the people's document--the Constitution--to put an actual spending limit in place to control the beast in Washington."

A campaign to pass a balanced budget amendment through Congress fell short by just one vote in the Senate in the 1990s.

Last year, House Republicans proposed a spending-limit amendment that would limit federal spending to 20 percent of the economy. According to the amendment's language, the restriction could be overridden by a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress or by a declaration of war.

[I want to scream in orgasmic delight at the thought of a balanced budget. I even like the provision that special circumstances, like war, can call for extra spending, because Hitler had to die whatever the cost in treasure.]

And the two I'm not too thrilled about:

6. The federal Constitution should define marriage as between one man and one woman in all 50 states.

[I don't think government has the power to make this decision. The government, including state governments, should stay as far away from marriage as possible.]

7. Abortion should be made illegal throughout the country.

[I lean toward states rights on this one, but not entirely. There are circumstances where I think abortion is justified (e.g. certain congenital abnormalities that are always fatal, often with the baby surviving only a few hours or days), or even required (situations that lead to maternal death). Is Perry saying he would rather have the mother die to preserve "the soul of this country and to the traditional values [of] our founding fathers"?]

Barney Frank

2011-08-19T02:44:00.004-04:00

Barney Frank (the guy whose speech no one can understand) is on MSNBC on the Rachel Maddow Show, being watched by all of ten people, when he lifts his cheek and lets out an atomic fart, without excusing himself, without even pausing. Thanks to the video being posted on the Internet something produced by MSNBC is getting more viewers than I have fingers and toes. This made my day. This is easily the funniest thing I have seen in months and probably one of the funniest things ever. In this world gone mad it's nice to have something good like this to report about.

Surgeons and the Soul

2011-08-18T02:21:00.002-04:00

Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander talks about his NDE while he had bacterial meningitis (2 videos, 9 minutes total).

Cardiac surgeon Lloyd Rudy tells two stories about his patients NDEs and what they brought back (12 1/2 minutes). One man comes back after twenty minutes with no heart beat with veridical perceptions of the operation.

The One Beyond Duality

2011-08-16T22:37:00.007-04:00

Prior to being. Above essence. Here is a thirty minute lecture with Prof. Philip Cary on Plotinus, Neoplatonism, and the unity of all things. First is a diagram I made while listening of Plotinus' cosmology:

In the center is the One, beyond distinctions, the source of all existence, shining like the sun. Around it is the Divine Mind (Nous), which is suffused with the light of the One. It is perfect in its intelligence and is unmoved and unchanging. Beyond this is the Soul. When turned in, to take part in the perfection of the Divine Mind, it is the one World Soul. When turned out it takes on the multiplicity of every individual soul. Beyond this is the world of matter and seperation, suffering, desire, and death. The soul looks out and falsly identifies with images in the physical world. Everything is created as an outflowing of the One, its superabundance, although it is not actually doing anything. The rays of the One become more and more diffuse the farther out one goes, and the more imperfect and fragmented things become.

Here is another 30 minute lecture, also by Prof. Cary, that gets into Plotinus' spirituality. I think it is actually better than the first.

Rumors of War I

2011-08-16T00:53:00.002-04:00

An hour long documentary on why a nuclear Iran should scare you.

I Make It Rain

2011-08-14T14:20:00.003-04:00

Remy explains why the debt ceiling was raised.

Talking dogs explain quantitative easing.

A Short Quiz on Intelligent Design

2011-08-13T23:20:00.002-04:00

VJ Torley at UD posts a ten question quiz for proponents and opponents of ID. Here are the questions and my answers.

1. On a scale of 0 (diehard disbeliever) to 10 (firm believer), how would you rate your level of belief in Intelligent Design? (Minimal Definition of Intelligent Design: The idea that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by an undirected process.)

Update: When I say “certain features”, I mean, “certain generic features of the universe-as-a-whole (e.g. constants of Nature) and of living things in general (e.g. the specified complexity of DNA”. When I say “an undirected process” I mean a process lacking long-range foresight.

10

2. What do you regard as the best argument for Intelligent Design?

I really like cosmological fine-tuning, because I like very large numbers. I also like that there is no mathematical model for “natural selection” (it is such a nebulous concept, existing in whatever form is most convenient at the time, that I doubt it can have a mathematical model or that it even meets the criteria of science). Mutations not producing new genetic information (where did information come from in the first place then?) and life not being able to self-assemble (abiogenesis) are also good ones.

3. What do you regard as the best argument against Intelligent Design?

Suboptimality (the designer either does not no how to, cannot, or will not design an optimal world for what reason(s)?). Actually, this is not an argument against ID, just certain assumptions about the nature of the designer. That said I can’t think of any counter arguments I think are good.

4. I’d like you to think about the arguments for Intelligent Design. Obviously they’re not perfect. Exactly where do you think these arguments need the most work, to make them more effective?

Perform A LOT MORE experiments, which necessarily entails mainstream science opening up to the possibility of ID. I would also like to see more atheist/agnostic ID proponents, or even just more non-Christian ID proponents (or at least Christians who don’t quote the Bible as scientific evidence).

5. Now I’d like you to think about the arguments against Intelligent Design. Obviously they could be improved. Exactly where do you think these arguments need the most work, to make them more effective?

Stop with the snarky cheap shots like talking about ID versus “real” science or claming that it is religion or the “overwhelming evidence” for RM+NS that is genuine evidence but nowhere near “overwhelming”, nor is it “fact” or demonstrated as well as gravity. Either rebut ID on purely scientific grounds or admit you don’t like it for religious reasons and that’s why you attack ID proponents.

Demonstrating that life can self-assemble, or at least that all the proteins needed for life can self-assemble. Demonstrating that random processes can produce completely new information, not just delete or rearrange pre-existing information in a genome.

6. (a) If you’re an ID advocate or supporter, what do you think is the least bad of the various alternatives that have been proposed to Intelligent Design, as explanations for the specified complexity found in living things and in the laws of the cosmos? (e.g. The multiverse [restricted or unrestricted?]; Platonism; the laws of the cosmos hold necessarily, and they necessarily favor life; pure chance; time is an illusion, so CSI doesn’t increase over time.)

(b) If you’re an ID opponent or skeptic, can you name some explanations for life and the cosmos that you would regard as even more irrational than Intelligent Design? (e.g. Everything popped into existence out of absolutely nothing; the future created the past; every logically possible world exists out there somewhere; I am the only being in the cosmos and the external world is an illusion requiring no explanation; only minds are real, so the physical universe is an illusion requiring no explanation.)

(a) I don’t think there are any acceptable alternatives that are purely materialistic. I suppose if I had to choose I would say that the alternative I see as best is that the future act as a teleological attractor to the past, guiding the evolution of forms in the past to a predetermined future (I’ve read this somewhere).

Eros/Thanatos

2011-08-13T21:19:00.003-04:00

The L: Volume One (of three) is coming to an end, hopefully by the end of August. I've been working on it since February 2008. Once Volume One is complete I would like to take a break from The L to persue other projects. Integral Politics II just needs a few charts drawn up before it's complete; Why Study History is slowly being worked out in bits and pieces; I've got a video on the First World War recorded that just needs editing for 11 November and a six part series called "The Divine Paradox" being scripted (1/3 complete).

In the works for comics is an idea being called "Eros/Thanatos", that has an interesting genesis, that looks as if it might be the next comic project I take on. It started as a story called "Monster" about a serial killer who targeted homeless people. Then I got the idea: "what if he didn't have to kill them directly? What if he had devil powers?" This moved on to something called "Angel" like "Fallen" + "Predator" where the serial killer with devil powers became an angel who possesses people and then goes hunting. Briefly there were two angels fighting each other, then back to one. The basic idea was that the angel couldn't kill anyone directly, but had to trick them into a deadly situation, like spooking them into stepping into traffic or something, only more carefully thought out. Then I got to thinking: "how exactly are the people being hunted supposed to win? They're being hunted by an angel. It can't die and they can so they're pretty much screwed from the beginning. Also, why exactly is the angel hunting people?" I decided to make the story about the psychology of the people being hunted instead of the angel. The final version of the story, now titled "Eros/Thanatos" deales much more with the psychological aspect, ignoring the whole angel idea almost altogether. Now a detective investigating the peoples' deaths has to decide whether they are actually being hunted by something or whether these are clever suicides or just random accidents, with the issue not being resolved by the end. Here is the introduction:

At the end of the Nineteenth Century Sigmund Freud pioneered the study of the human mind. Equally revolutionary as his psychotherapy was another of his practices: Freud actually listened to women. Rampant misogyny and antisemitism caused the intellectuals of Europe to disregard Freud's theories as "Jew science." While he has been largely supplanted today by the likes of James, Skinner, and the Gestalt psychology, Freud was essential to the initial development of this most important of Western sciences.

Disillusioned by the destructiveness of the First World War, Freud added to his model of the unconscious processes of the mind. Aside from the desire for life and construction, Eros, Freud included the death drive, later to be named Thanatos (although Freud himself never used the term). Seeing the millions sent to die for ideas of nationalism and patriotism, his growing pessimism led him to believe that people unconsciously desire self-destruction more than sexual pleasure. For Freud, Thanatos, the drive toward repetition, aggression, and eventually one's own death, was more powerful. The human mind is a battle between Eros and Thanatos: a battle Thanatos inevitably will win.

However, it is not that simple. Eros is not completely powerless. Eros, the desire for life, seeks not to defeat death but to control it. Eros serves as a means of cheating death so as to die in the way one most desires. We might join Lord Kitchener's army to die on the fields of Flanders. We might drive a fast motorcycle through red lights or jump out of airplanes. We might ignore obvious warning signs like a dripping wet floor or walk into oncoming traffic. Whatever the reason, according to Freud, our desire to die is the primary driving force in our lives, and a desire we wish to direct toward our own ends. But, except for the suicide, we can't choose our own deaths. Can we?

The Kamchatka Expeditions: Russia's Lewis and Clark

2011-08-10T23:35:00.009-04:00

The following was written in April 2008, so it is not as good as it could be today. I remember one day I was half asleep while watching a program on the television about a group of men who got lost in the White Sea for several months and most or all of them died. This inspired me to investigate this situation, but instead of learning anything about them I discovered

Danish explorer Vitus Bering (for whom the Bering Strait is named) and thus began my fascination with Russian history. The unfortunate fact is that there are only about two books in English about Bering. The rest are in Russian and the only copies I could find were in the Moscow University library, neither of which is very helpful. Here is what I could glean from those two sources. This is probably the most detailed English language page on Vitus Bering on the Internet.

The image to the left is Vitus Bering, who for years had been given the wrong portrait and was not correctly identified until his body was dug up centuries later. The image on the right is a French map (interestingly enough) of the Chukotka region, where Bering launched several expeditions. The name "Chukotski Nos" means "Holy Cape," with "Holy" meaning "impossible to circumnavigate." The caption (too small to read in the reduced image) reads "It is not known whether this mountain chain terminates somewhere or joins another continent."

The popular view of the First Kamchatka Expedition, launched in 1725, was that Emperor Peter the Great of Russia ordered Vitus Jonassen Bering to discover whether or not Asia and America were joined by a land route or were separate land masses and to explore the possibility of a sea route between the Arctic and Pacific oceans. The importance of a Northeast passage to the Far East for purposes of trade seems undeniable in light of the undeveloped status of most of the Eastern regions of Siberia and the difficulty of crossing the terrain by land; answering the question of the land connection between Asia and America was a necessary corollary to the more important question of the Northeast passage. Over three centuries dozens of scholars have held this view including Gerhard F. Müller, one of the first to write on Bering's voyages, Johann G. Gmelin, William H. Dall, Frank A. Golder, and Stuart R. Tompkins.

Gerhard Müller taught history and geography at the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences along with working in the library. He was one of the main translators of documents and correspondences for Vitus Bering during his explorations of Siberia. Müller first wrote about the expedition in 1730 and was possibly the first person to advance the view that the purpose of the voyage was to search for the Northeast passage. According to Carol Urness it is no surprise that Müller advanced such a view as it suited his interests quite well. Had the first written account of the voyages been written by someone not interested in geography the problem of the connection between Asia and America would not have played so prominent a role in such a person's writing. None-the-less, for whatever reason Müller chose to emphasize the geographical problem, this would become the prevailing view of the purpose behind the voyages and would not be challenged until after the Second World War.

Since then new views arose questioning the traditional view. This reexamination was in part due to evidence that proof of the separation of the continents had already been established much earlier, eliminating the need for such an expedition as proposed by the traditional view of the Kamchatka Expeditions. In 1648 a group of merchant vessels in search of walrus ivory became lost at sea and sailed around the Chukotsk Peninsula, which was believed to have continued on to join with North America. This accidental voyage proved that the two continents were separated. In light of this discovery why then did Peter the Great commission the two Kamchatka Expeditions?

Raymond Fisher proposes that there were four possibilities as to why these expeditions were commissioned: 1. Peter wanted better proof of the separation of the continents from more credible explorers; 2. The significance and details of the discovery had not reached Moscow and Saint Petersburg by the time the explorations were commissioned; 3. Knowledge of the accidental voyage had been forgotten over the 77 years since it had taken place; 4. Peter had much grander goals in mind, namely designs on colonies in North America, than solving a seemingly unimportant geographical question. [1]

There is no evidence that Peter or his officials knew of the previous voyage 77 years earlier. "Knowledge of the voyage in Moscow and European Russia seems to have disappeared by the end of the Seventeenth Century." [2] This discredits the first possibility. Fisher feels that while the second and third possible reasons for the voyage are still viable, in the light of evidence for the fourth one being true the other two are reduced to being irrelevant.

According to Boris P. Polevoi, the real objective of the expeditions was to create accurate maps of North America so Russia could exert dominance over the continent and further the Russian Empire. However, Peter feared a voyage explicitly directed toward America would provoke European powers in America to forestall Russian expansion and so he "circulated the story... that Bering was being sent into the North Pacific for the purely scientific purpose of ascertaining whether an Arctic-Pacific passage between Asia and America exists." [3] The Western European powers had been interested in the existence of such a passage for centuries by this point and would see any investigation of the passage to be to their benefit, as oppose to the establishment of future sites for Russian colonization which would be met with hostility.

This fictitious story being propagated to distract the Western European powers reached Bering before Peter's actual instructions did, because he did not send them until the last minute to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. When Bering read the instructions he mistakenly combined them with the story he had heard about the phony reason for the expedition and combined them into his own interpretation of the instructions. It is clear from this why Bering turned his ships back and ended the first expedition after sailing around the Chukotsk Peninsula believing that he had completed his assigned task.

Fisher disagrees. He thinks that the original goal Peter had in mind was to find out where Asia and America are joined by land, and, from there, to explore farther to locate the nearest European settlement in America. Bering did not reach any European cities but instead turned back after finding that the Chukotsk Peninsula does not extend to America. Had his goal been to discover a passage between the Arctic and Pacific oceans, Bering would not have turned back but instead would have kept sailing onward into the Arctic ocean. Fisher bases his argument on the original instructions given to Bering by Peter the Great. Peter's original instructions for Bering read (paraphrasing from multiple translation):
1. At Kamchatka or elsewhere you are to build one or two boats.
2. You are to sail along the coast of the land which goes north with these boats. It is expected that since the end of this land is not known that it appears to be part of America.
3. You are to search for where the land is joined with America, and go from there to any European possessions, or if you find a European ship, find out from it the name of the coast, and go ashore and obtain any information you can; write everything down and bring it back so a map can be constructed from the information.

It is clear from the original instructions that they are not supportive of the traditional interpretation of the voyage. The instructions say nothing of a Northeast passage or determining the relationship between Asia and North America. In fact, Peter assumes the two continents are joined as one and he does not ask Bering to further investigate into his assumption.

Though Bering discovered no land connection between the continents it is likely he believed such a land bridge existed farther West of where he had explored.

Yet another proposed reason behind the first expedition, argued by Carol Urness, involves settlement of a problem relating to the Russian maps at the time. The map made by Johann Homann in 1723 was the chief map of Siberia used at the time. Urness argues against Polevoi and Fisher's interpretations of the reasons behind the expedition. She argues that Bering was to discover whether or not a land labeled "incognita" on the Homann map (to the Northeast of the Eastern end of Siberia) was part of America. Having found that the land in question was part of Siberia and not America Bering figured he had completed his objective for the mission and decided to turn back, as he was only to go on to America if there was such a land connection as the one in question.

There is ample documentation regarding the destination and purpose of the Second Kamchatka Expedition, unlike the first. Bering proposed the second expedition to develop the land and infrastructure of Eastern Siberia in order to pave the way for large scale exploration necessary to establish trade between Japan and the native populations of North America and to exert better control over Russia's borders in the East. Fisher asserts that Bering was not interested in solving the problem of whether Asia and America are connected by land or not. The overland routes across Siberia were difficult to traverse and transporting goods and materials by land took too long. Finding the Northeast sea route was important for trade, not to quell scientific curiosity.

The Russian government added further objectives to the second expedition. Included in these further reasons were voyages from Kamchatka to America and Japan, looking for undiscovered islands between Russia and America and to bring them under Russian control, to explore the resources of these new lands so that they can be exploited later on, and to write a natural history of all the lands discovered. They also planned to extend the Russian Empire to all the native populations that would be discovered, the area that would become Alaska. [4]

References

[1] Page 5. Raymond H. Fisher, Bering's Voyages: Whither and Why. Seattle and London, University of Washington Press,1977.
[2] Page 5. Fisher.
[3] Page 73. Fisher.
[4] Page 34. Gerhard Friedrich Müller, Translated with Commentary by Carol Urness, Bering's Voyages: The Reports From Russia. Fairbanks, The University of Alaska Press, 1986.

Why Study History (Exerpt 2)

2011-08-06T18:32:00.006-04:00

The following is a footnote that occupies roughly one entire page in 2500 word "Why Study History," now the second longest post:

Ben Franklin talks about people being willing to sacrifice liberty or freedom for security, but I don't think this is the case. Certainly since 9/11 the American people have given up a lot of freedom – the Patriot Act, TSA gate rape, warrantless wire taps, extraordinary rendition – but the country is no safer than it was on 9/10. for all the freedom the American people have surrendered, they have gained no real security, only the illusion of security.

Counter-terrorism advances only in light of failed attacks. Someone tries to blow up their shoe, you now have to take your shoes off; someone tries to blow up a condom, you now have to get gate raped. The counter-terrorists are only responding to things terrorists have done in the past. There is talk now of suicide bombers with surgically implanted explosives that cannot be detected by the fancy X-ray machines that former DHS Secretary, Michael Chertoff, made a lot of money off of, or the enhanced pat downs, and let us not forget that infants and a terminally ill elderly woman have to be strip searched because they really are plausible terrorists.

Nor is this anything new. Morgan Stanley security chief Rick Rescorla warned the Port Authority of the possibility of a truck bomb attack against the World Trade Center before the 1993 bombing. Only afterward were security measures put in place to prevent additional ground-level attacks, and Rick warned that the next attack would come from someone flying a plane into the towers. He spent the better part of the next decade preparing for that attack and saved thousands of lives, at the cost of his own.

Merely reacting to terror acts is not enough. Independent thinkers must be allowed to think ahead to future and novel attacks. This being said, I am not here to prescribe solutions to terrorism. These examples only serve to demonstrate the point I was making regarding security. People do not surrender their freedom for actual security, but for the illusion of security, and that illusory security is borne out of the need for convenience. Much as people may be inconvenienced by gate rape it would be even more inconvenient to challenge authority and demand a total overhaul of government. Giving up thought and responsibility to government is a whole lot more convenient than the alternative, and thus we sacrifice our freedom and are no better off than we were a decade ago.

S&P Downgrade US Credit Rating

2011-08-05T20:42:00.006-04:00

Standard&Poor's downgraded the US credit rating from AAA to AA+ (one level lower) on Friday because Congress increased the "debt ceiling" and refused to make real spending cuts (they "promised"* to cut almost the same amount they raised it, over ten years, meaning net increase in the short term and a balanced budget by the time I'm an old man, or possibly dead, and then only temporarily until debt increases ahead of spending cuts). S&P said that if the US doesn't get its act together they might downgrade the credit rating again in 12 to 18 months. Right now the safest treasuries in the world are from the UK, and you've seen the turmoil they are in.

Why is it called a debt "ceiling" if they can just keep raising it? Why not call it a "debt nebulous thing to distract the public from how they're getting screwed?" My guess is because that name is too long. It's like how "jury of complete and utter morons who are unqualified to make decisions on these matters" is rendered "jury of your peers."

====
In better news, I've written a 300 word footnote to "Why Study History," covering two pages, explaining the term "center of gravity." I estimate the whole thing, when completed, will be between eight and ten-thousand words long, making it the longest Urban Mystic post ever.

*When politicians make promises, they are, in fact, lies.

NASA: "There's No Climate Change" or Killing a Dead Horse

2011-08-01T22:47:00.004-04:00

In the first episode of the Dilbert television series the Boss explains why Dilbert and his employees must invent a new product; a process that leads Dilbert to a lot of trouble and anxiety. The conversation goes as thus:

Boss: Well, troops, I assume you've all been informed on the problems with our flagship product.
Everyone: *various replies in the negative*
Boss: Well, there's no point in killing a dead horse.
Dilbert: You mean 'there's no point in beating a dead horse.'
Boss: Why would anyone beat a dead horse?
Dilbert: Why would anyone kill a dead horse?
Boss: Maybe it'd kick you.
Dilbert: It's dead!
Boss: And so is every customer who used our flagship product.

This subject of there being no climate change/global warming (hide the decline) seems to me like killing a dead horse. The horse is already dead: all the evidence has already obliterated the alarmist climate predictions, and yet, again and again, I as well as others must slay this already slain horse and present even more evidence that there is no climate change.

A new NASA study from 2000 to 2011 has shown that the upper atmosphere is letting "far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted."

Dr. Roy Spencer and his team have discovered that "real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models," and that "increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed."

Just like with extinction rates and probably everything else in the universe, actual data trumps assumptions these "scientists" of today are putting into their computer models. You would think "scientists" would know a thing or two about empiricism by now, but instead they keep relying on those damn models. The value of a model is organizing data after the fact so it can be better understood in a greater context, not substituting for data.

James Taylor writing for Forbs comments, "The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate. ¶Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is "not much")."

He ends with the following statement (that I am in total agreement on):

"When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a "huge discrepancy" between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are."

Israel's Original Borders (or The Arabs and their Lies)

2011-07-29T14:49:00.004-04:00

At the end of the First World War, Britain had defeated the Ottoman empire and gained control of most of the Near East (Palestine/Israel, Transjordan, and Iraq), with France gaining modern day Syria and Lebanon. This was a legitimate territorial acquisition as decided in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne. Prior to this time the area of greater Syria (the area in question) was ruled by the Ottoman empire for five hundred years. The British region of greater Syria was divided in two, with roughly one fourth being given to Jews (Palestine/Israel) and the other three fourths given to the Arabs (Transjordan). This was how the legitimate rulers of the land decided to legitimately divide the land. The fictional "Palestinian" people (who were really southern Syrians) were ALL supposed to go into Transjordan, but because they hate Jews they want to take Israel/Palestine too and they are doing so by creating a fictional national identity and crying foul to the international community.

In the following video, Israel's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon explains the historical facts relating to the Israeli Palestinain conflict. Runs 6:17.

25 Things I've Learned from the movie "Paycheck"

2011-07-24T16:08:00.005-04:00

In the same vein as 100 Things I've Learned from MLP, here's what I learned from watching the movie Paycheck, starring Ben Affleck. Now, it's not 100 things because I've only seen the last 15 minutes, but I think those were probably the choicest minutes.

1. Ben Affleck has ninja powers
2. When Ben Affleck hits someone they stay hit
3. When Ben Affleck hits someone they go flying
4. Ben Affleck can beat four guys armed with machine guns at the same time
5. Ben Affleck built the most advanced computer lab in the world with a miniature pond and smoke machines and palm trees
6. The World's Slowest Man
7. Ben Affleck's enemy is The World's Slowest Man
8. Ben Affleck hacked a computer using only a quarter
9. The World's Slowest Man walks in slow motion when everyone around him runs
10. Ben Affleck can see the future
11. Shooting a liquid nitrogen tank causes an explosion that can destroy a whole giant building
12. Ben Affleck destroyed an entire airport with two marbles
13. In Ben Affleck's world bullets explode in a shower of sparks whenever they hit anything except liquid nitrogen tanks, which they go through like tissue paper
14. In Ben Affleck's world when someone shoots themself in the foot they go flying and do a backflip
15. In Ben Affleck's world robot arms that build computers know Kung Fu and can beat up a whole lot of armed guards and give their weapons to Ben Affleck
16. Ben Affleck can lift two man-sized bags of dirt as if they were empty
17. Ben Affleck did a ninja move where he jumped feet first at a man's legs and knocked him through a window that was placed in the middle of a room for some reason
18. If you hit a bullet nothing will happen; if Ben Affleck hits a bullet it fires
19. He's Ben Affleck, you can't out act him!
20. You can't out act Ben Affleck
21. If Ben Affleck is in a movie you know he wins
22. Ben Affleck can MacGyver things
23. Ben Affleck has a line on his face
24. An explosion that destroys an entire building will just slowly cook The World's Slowest Man while incinerating the walls around him in a second so he suffers more because he's the villain
25. When someone is secretly getting Ben Affleck out of a secret building where everyone is looking for him and someone asks "is that Ben Affleck?" the person he's with just has to say "no, he didn't make it," and none of the twenty guys looking for him will recognize him and they will let him go even though he's not even wearing a disguise

In Soviet Union FDA Regulates You

2011-07-24T02:16:00.006-04:00

You can't take stem cells out of your own body, culture them, and put them back in your own body to treat previously untreatable diseases because the FDA says your own cells are a drug and now they have the power to regulate your own body.

The FDA started regulating cells taken from one person's body and put into a different person in 2005, but now they have begun regulating your own body. This is Brave New World NWO government trying to take control of every last little aspect of our lives to make us their slaves. This is the pernicious evil of Cass Sunstein and how all he ever wanted was to regulate peoples' lives. And on the heels of this, now the FDA wants to regulate your smart phone pros:

TheSlaveKeyboardist said it best: "The FDA needs to be done away with! Because of the FDA there's more treatments than cures. If there was no FDA cures would be more profitable than treatment, since the fda in effect raises the cost of rx's treatments are research so big pharm can still make a profit. There are cures for things but since they're orphan drugs no one wants to put up the money to get it approved!"

Why Study History (PREVIEW)

2011-07-19T09:19:00.004-04:00

(Note: This is a work in progress, started at around 1AM and continuing until my cold abates. The final version will be posted in a day or two. This is the first time I have ever put my history/memory dichotomy into writing since I first began to formulate it about a year ago.)

This is a very important question and I will attempt to give it a very good answer.

We study history to know who we are as a people, to know why we have the values that we have, to know why different people are living in different situations, but there is an even more important reason why we study history.

We study history to know the future.

How is this possible?

Before I answer that question, permit me to veer off in another direction for a moment. What is history? History is one subset of all past events. This might seem incorrect in the popular view of history as being everything that happened in the past, but this view popular view is wrong for at least two reasons.

First, history is a narrative; it is a story whose subject is the past. As such, history cannot exist without the structures in place needed to allow the formation of narratives (language, social structures, etc.), meaning there was a time when events did not pass into history, they were just lost. There is no history of Neanderthal man because there are no narratives surviving from that time, and furthermore, there is strong reason to believe that the necessary conditions for the creation of those narratives had not come into existence yet. This is why history does not begin until, largely, the invention of writing, because writing is a means of preserving that narrative from cultures that have been lost to time (although, there are oral traditions, such as the Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala and the Australian Aborigines who do preserve historical narratives from before the invention of writing).

Second, there is a growing trend that is beginning to gain widespread attention, though not yet acceptance, that you cannot separate the subject from the experience. A scientist's role in performing an experiment cannot be separated out from the experiment to produce neutral results. No matter how you try to set something up, you cannot remove the subject. Put another way, all knowledge is subjective. This is where the big split occurs in past events for you, the subject. Events that you have not participated in are history, because they exist for you only as the narrative. Events that you did participate in are for you memory. A boy storming the beaches at Normandy will forever experience those events as memory, whereas I, removed from those events, can only experience them as history.

Don't Take This The Wrong Way

2011-07-14T04:43:00.004-04:00

The Amazing Atheist calls Rebecca sexist, and I completely agree. He also congratulates her for getting Richard Dawking to actually comment on her insignificant non-problem mere moment of discomfort. Wonderful, insiteful, very funny video.

Runs 13:50

Absorb into Yourself, All the Rivers of Your Desires

2011-07-13T02:37:00.002-04:00

Swami Kriyananda talks about how the joy from worldly desires drain us while the joy of the Self renews us. He also talks about how eternity is never boring because even though it never changes it's always new.

Runs 8:19

Why Democrats HATE Space Travel

2011-07-09T00:56:00.007-04:00

Reflecting on the last shuttle launch I sit in dissapointment at the whole shuttle program. This is it? This is the best we can do? I came across the following article today from UD. Physicist Rob Sheldon explains that Republicans have been very good to NASA and the space program but Democrats HATE it because they can't get past partisan politics. They would rather turn America communist than explore space, advance science, increase national pride, and bolster international cooperation. He says:

Republicans have generally put US Space Policy or Foreign policy above politics, and have funded unpopular endeavors even when begun by previous Democratic presidents, recognizing that it takes 10 years to see a NASA program from start-to-finish, which is longer than the usual presidential double-term.

Democrats, however, believe that there is nothing more important than politics. Everything is short term. The future can be mortgaged. So for example George HW Bush started the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) to follow on the very successful Fermilab “Tevatron”.

Unfortunately, he built it in Texas, which gave it a partisan air. The very first thing Clinton did, was to cancel the SSC, thereby handing the next 20 years of high-energy physics to the European lab CERN in Geneva.

He continues with a point on the space station. The idea for the space station was started by Reagan as a means to develop technology needed to go to Mars. When Clinton got into office he did his best to axe the program.

But under Clinton, the Space Station was scaled back as far as possible without defaulting on commitments made to the Europeans. This meant that the Russians were brought in to supply the Space Station rather than use US Space Shuttles. So when the commitments to Europe had all been fulfilled, both the Station and the Shuttle were obsolete.

As a boy I wondered why it seemed the greatest days of space exploration were behind us. Why did we have grand visions of going to the Moon by the end of the 60s (which we did) and go on to Mars before 2000 and eventually on to the stars, but now we kept launching those damn shuttles into orbit where the astronauts ate their tubes of mush and powered ice cream and nothing ever got done? And why were our first astronauts the toughest people on the planet like John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, people you could really look up to (Buzz Aldrin still is my hero and I still want to be like him), and the new astronauts include people you've never heard of and the "astro-nut" who tried to kill someone and didn't want to be bothered with having to use the toilet so she wore a diaper while she did it. The answer is clear: Democrats. Democrats took all the fun out of space. They turned space travel into a vacation for adults who like to wear diapers and eat floating candy at tax payers' expense instead of the most challenging exploration of the universe imaginable.

Capital Bush even wanted to go back to the Moon. He tried for Mars but the socialists wouldn't let him so he settled for the Moon. He started late in his tenure and didn't get enough finished and then Zero took office and killed the Moon mission. Instead of exploring space and promoting world peace, Zero is "humanitarianly" bombing the crap out of Libya (it's not a war, it's "kinetic military action" and that means it's totally not unconstitutional like BOTH Republicans and Democrats in Congress are now saying) and spending the country into oblivion.

Fuck you, Democrats. Fuck you Zero. Fuck you very much.

Richard Dawkins is Right

2011-07-08T00:16:00.005-04:00

About one issue in particular. I still disagree with him on practically everything else in the entire universe.

Apparently some broad got propositioned in an elevator at some conference, like that doesn't happen every day everywhere in the world and throughout all of human history and forever into the future (except the elevator part, which wasn't invented until the 19th century, although there were elevator-like transport sysems in place for thousands of years prior). The two most liked comments on that video sum up public, and my own, sentiment pretty well that this is a total load of horseshit and nothing wrong happened at all. As an outspoken atheist she should be flattered that he was (supposedly) just following what Darwin said, because it demonstrates that the cock and balls fairy story of Darwinism is right, or at least can be seen in that light if you choose to believe in that stuff (I don't, but as an outspoken media atheist fundamaterialist spep-dick she has to believe it, so of course she should be happy to see Darwinian principles in action!). After this complete and total non-event Dick-to-the-Dawk-to-the-PhD said this:

The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that....Rebecca's feeling that the man's proposition was 'creepy' was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

And with that I finally found something to agree with Dawkins on! Never did I think that would ever happen.

Unfortunately, modern society is run by the New World Order and they are making people kowtow to pussies who are professional victims and it's not politically correct to say "shut up and deal with it," when either someone gets injured through their own stupidity or the laws of nature are percieved to be unfair.

Thank you, Mr. Dawkins, for being the voice of reason in this insane world (about this one issue, although I still think your other claims are asinine).

The Other Wiki's Bias

2011-06-23T02:25:00.003-04:00

You know, I know, and every sentient being in the universe knows that the other wiki is biased toward fundamaterialism. This topic has been written about before on the old Urban Mystic, and now it is being written about here.

But first, here's a bit of old news that really reminds me of the other wiki. On 7 February 2011, Muzzammil Syed Hassan, the founder of a Muslim-oriented television network, Bridges TV, behedded his wife inside the tv studio because she wanted a divorce. She filed for a divorce because he liked to beat her. Hassan believed he was in the right, as any good Muslim would beat and behead his wife, but he was convicted of second degree murder and is serving 25 years in prison (meaning he'll be out in 5, 10 tops, for making his bed and cleaning the toilet). The mission of the television network was to counter negative stereotypes of Muslims in the west after the 9/11 attacks.

On to the main story, Daily Grail writer Greg Taylor has posted a short piece on the bias of the other wiki in favor of fundamaterialism.

But first, here's a comment left on UD by someone writing as junkdnaforlife on the other wiki's bias (bold in original):

This is an expert from the talk page of the Shroud of Turin article. The problem here was that too many atheists were complaining that the Shroud article was too “pro-authentic”, and had to be changed. The re-butt to this claim was that all the “pro-authentic” info was from peer reviewed journals, and that if the scientific evidence pointed more towards authentic than not, than that is that. But the atheists would not have it. Scientific evidence is apparently only gospel if it fits with their dogma.

So what did the lead editor have to say about the weight of peer review articles vs. “skeptic websites”?

“Wikipedia does not work that way my friend. If the readers at large feel the article is too pro-authenticity, it does not matter what the academics think. At the moment there is just one IP complaining, the key is not to get to the point where 20 IPs complain. Then we will need a rewrite. And I must say the complaints of this IP are not all empty. He has some valid points. I do not see Joe Nickle as respectable, but he has 1,000 times more readers than all the other academics combined, so he can not be ignored and must be mentioned. Wikipedia is a “public” item, not an academic item.” History2007 (talk) 16:55, 6 November 2010 (UTC)

Again: Wikipedia is a “public” item, not an academic item.”

Remember this is a response to the overwhelming peer reviewed papers that support the Shroud’s authenticity. So to combat the peer reviewed papers, the science and reason police simply state that the academics do not matter more or less than a popular writer. The number of “readers” someone has now apparently holds as much weight than a Phd in the field. Perez Hilton can therefore weigh in on string theory. As long as the evidence goes against their dogma, then any BS is apparently allowed to hold as much water as peer review. And not just allowed but mandatory.

Back on track, Mr. Taylor corrected an article on trance medium Leonora Piper, pointing out flaws in skep-dick Martin Gardner's debunking. These corrections were removed and the original garbage put back up because Taylor's work was "original research":

According to user LuckyLouie, the reason for this was that "Wikipedia has a very clear policy of avoiding primary sources and instead using secondary sources that are at least one step removed from an event", and "On Wikipedia we like our 'informations' to come from reliable sources...rather than an editor doing their own original research and coming to their own original conclusions."

As an historian I can say folks in my field value primary sources over anything else. Historians want to get at primary sources, to know what really happened, rather than rely on what someone wrote later on. I learned about the value of primary sources first hand, so I can say that the other wiki and myself are fundamentally different in our view of what is and is not important in assessing facts (like Indiana Jones said, historians deal with facts, philosophers deal with truth).

Mr. Taylor points out that the other wiki holds up arch-skep-dicks as bastions of information, even when they have not done any relevant research on a topic, whereas any conflicting experts, people who have spent decades doing actual research in a given field, are tossed aside.

Gardner's article should never, ever be cited by anyone as having any authority in the Piper case. This is not based on opinion, or belief in the paranormal - it's based simply on Gardner's inability to provide factual information.

What follows is a list of Gardner's either ignorance of the facts or a deliberate attempt to mislead people.

Michael Prescott gives his take on the issue here. It's also short and a good read.

40 Years of Drug War Failure

2011-06-17T16:39:00.003-04:00

Retired Maryland State Police Major Neill Franklin, Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) explains why the War on Drugs has failed, how current drug policy has made the situation much worse than ever before, and what can be done to solve the problem, like taking Marijuana off Schedule I. Runs 8.5 minutes.

The Tax Code

2011-06-12T22:28:00.008-04:00

In the 1999 revolutionary block buster The Matrix computer hacker turned ninja warrior Cypher told new recruite Neo that even though the ship's computers could easily decipher the code of the Matrix the total amount of code in the Matrix was so vast that deciphering the whole thing is impossible. The United States tax code is the same.

Well, not exactly. Unlike the Matrix there is no easy way to decipher the tax code. It is written in the thickest, most unintelligible legal language imaginable, making it the bane of millions of American's existence.

I got to thinking "just how long is the US tax code?"

According to ReasonTV (part of the Reason Foundation), Americans paid $27.7 billion to comply with their taxes (these are 2008 statistics).

Also in 2008 the bottom 50% of taxpayers paid just 2.99% of total income tax collected by the federal government. In contrast the top 1% (the evil rich) paid 39.89%! Over 13 times more! The top 5% paid 60.14% of all taxes, and the top 10% paid 70.79%. Anyone who is not mentally challenged and is not blatantly lying to themself can see that there is absolutely no way the rich are not being taxed enough and that taxing the rich more won't make things better.

That's all very nice. No, it's all very disturbing, but it doesn't answer the question. How long is the tax code?

From what I can gather the US tax code is written by the IRS and Congress. The IRS writes Title 26 of the United States Code of Federal Regulations (known affectionately as "26 CFR"). Congress writes its own regulations under the name Title 26 of the United States Code. When you put these together you get the tax code.

The part written by Congress can easily be found online at the US Government Printing Office website. It consists of a single 18MB PDF with all of 3,728 pages for 2009 (the most recent digitized year). Researching 7 Days involved reading over 2,000 pages, to provide a comparison.

Finding the IRS portion of the code was much more difficult. They had split it up among 20 to 100+ individual PDF files. I did find a print copy of some or all of the IRS code for sale for just over $1200 (shipping included), but I am not going to purchase this entire library of text to find out how many pages it is. After searching I discovered that CCH Incorporated had solved the problem for me. They put the grand total of pages of the US tax code for 2010 at 71,684 pages. I have not discovered the missing 67,956 pages so I cannot confirm this number. According to their statistics the tax code has grown by almost 2,000 pages since 2009, and it is revised and enlarged every year.

My top speed reading seems to be around 40 pages/hour, and it goes down with boring or difficult text. To finish reading the entire tax code would take me 1,791 hours 6 minutes, or just over 74 1/2 days of continuous reading. Reading for a more realistic 10 hours, with breaks every 90 minutes to use the facility (est. 10 minutes/break, or 9 hours reading 1 hour peeing total) reading the entire tax code will take 200 days at top speed. In reality reading the whole thing would be impossible. That's why companies hire thousands of lawyers to study the tax code.

That's the answer, so what's the solution? Back when The Urban Mystic was on AOL instead of Google I proposed an alternative income tax scheme. Instead of 71 thousand pages let's simplify things to less than ten. The first page is simple, if you make more than $24,000 a year (2010 estimate of the minimum a single person must make in America just to survive) you pay 10%, no more, no less. It doesn't matter if you make $30 thousand or $30 million, you pay 10%. That means the minimum you pay, on an income of $24,000.01 you pay $2,400.00 in taxes. Donald Trump, who made $50 million in 2009, would pay $5 million in taxes, 2,083 times what someone on minimum wage would pay. There are no loop holes, no deductions, no fancy tricks. If you make more than the minimum you must pay 10%, full stop. The remaining 9 pages of my tax code would include penalties and whatever else is needed to determine how this works. It's not important. What really matters is the first page. Encapsulated in that first page is the solution to the tax problem. Economically speaking it is the red pill to get us out of this 71 thousand page Matrix.

Making A Marine

2011-06-11T01:13:00.002-04:00

In 12 weeks 200 ordinary mortals are transformed into members of the elite fighting force, the United States Marine Corps. Runs aprox. 21 minutes.

No Mass Extinction

2011-06-09T23:03:00.007-04:00

More old news, this time from UD. We learn that the "sixth great extinction," said to be caused by you and your carbon and certainly not Algore, who uses 24 times the carbon you do but he's better than you and so it's okay for him to do so, and you should feel bad, has been grossly miscalculated. According to Debora MacKenzie writing for New Scientist:

It is impossible to accurately measure extinction rates. Dozens of new species are identified each year, and counting those that disappear is hard because many are small and live in poorly studied, mainly tropical environments.

Instead, extinction rates are often predicted from a mathematical model based on habitat loss, which is more easily measured. (Bold Added)

Just like absolutely everything else a mathematical model is used instead of actually looking at the facts. They're not even measuring habitat loss, they're using a model of habitat loss to make predictions and then blaming you when two species of plant and one species of fish no one knew or cared about go missing. As a matter of fact, a full third of all mammal species declaired extinct in the past few centuries have turned out to be just hiding, including a cute little brown and white thing called an okapi and a few rat-like creatures. 67 out of 187 missing mammal species since 1500 have turned up alive and well. The sooner the little fellas went "extinct" the more likely they were to just be hiding somewhere. If a creature went missing in the 20th century it was three times more likely to still be alive than if it went missing in the 19th century. I guess a hundred years ago people knew what extinction really means. There is also the distinct possibility that the thylacine (Tazmanian tiger/wolf) did not go extinct in 1936, as evident by alleged sitings in the 1970s and even today, although no one really knows (I happen to think there is a very good chance they are still alive, maybe 80+ percent).

A new method for calculating the extinction rates of animals produces numbers 83-165 percent lower than using the old habitat loss models. That's a huge discrepancy with broad policy implications, such as plunging California's Central Valley into economy crushing drought to protect a tiny fish that may or may not have any significance to the area's ecosystem and probably won't go extinct anyway if water is diverted back to agricultural usage.

Extinction, habitat loss, and environmental degredation are serious problems, but it shouldn't be necessary to scare people into draconian 1984 iron-fisted government control to fix a problem that may not even exist. A little self-control goes a long way, and taking time to look through all the data is usually the best choice of action. There probably isn't a sixth great extinction, and if there is it probably isn't our fault (the first five weren't, after all; it's pretty arrogant to think this one is), but responsible stuardship of the planet is still important and is best conducted in a thorough, prudent manner.

A Head and Eight Testicles

2011-06-07T01:56:00.001-04:00

This is easily one of the funniest things I have seen in a long time. This Australian man says an octopus has eight testicles. You have got to see this.

The Jane Austen Project Preview

2011-06-01T23:17:00.004-04:00

I have begun my very own My Little Pony fan story. Initial estimates place the final length at 26 chapters, whatever that means. The first ever sketch can be found here. As chapters are finished they will probably be posted here (however long a chapter is), but for now here is the first 149 words!

Jane Austen's
The Scarlet Cutie Mark
A Bromance

One
After the Fall

Sylvan Forest
Sveltland
6,330 miles south of Ponyville

Fine drops of rain fall on everything and everypony in the thick forest. One by one they clear the late afternoon air of the smoke left by countless fires left burning for days. Here and there the faint glimmer of sunlight filters through the clouds, warming the land as well as the hearts of they who have assembled. In the grey-green darkness of the tiny clearing Constantine stands with his stallions, 20,000 in all, an assembly of the bravest, toughest, cussingist, drinkingist warriors ever assembled in the region's entire history. They are each clad in armour of boiled leather, hard as iron, with hobnail boots and a rolled steel helmet. They are as grim a sight as has ever been; enough to turn a pony's blood to ice.

Ben Stein Says The "Arab Spring" Sucks

2011-06-01T00:39:00.001-04:00

The pro-west anti-Iran, somewhat pro-Israel, somewhat pro-human rights Mubarak was ousted by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the exact opposite. Iran is making a play for the whole Near East.

In Memoriam

2011-05-30T20:12:00.006-04:00

Today is Memorial Day (30 May, ALWAYS 30 May, even if Congress decided to change it in 1968 to give jerks a three day weekend), originally known as Decoration Day. It was originally a day to remember those who had died in the Civil War. Now it seems to exist merely as an excuse for jerks to throw three day parties in which they consume vast quantities of alcohol and listen to loud music. I have nothing against alcohol or music, but ask yourselves, "why can I drink and party? Why am I free to do jackass things on this day off from work?"

My valued couple of readers (The Urban Mystic actually gets about 60 readers a day, 40 of whom come for the ponies), if you have spent any time at all here you know my fascination with the history of warfare and the military. I study war not because I love it, for only a madman could love war, but because it is my firm belief that if we all study war we can better be prepared for when war does come, and be better able to avoid war in the first palce. A sailor practies swimming not because he looks forward to his ship sinking but because he wants to be prepared should the terrible ordeal ever arise. I am the same.

Today I cannot say I spent much time reflecting on the sacrifices of those fellow Americans who gave the last full measure of freedom to secure my own, amidst all the inevitable distractions of moden life, but reflect I have. Our rights and our freedoms are given to us by God, and it is the patriots who take a stand to defend them. Men seek always to take that freedom from us. They always have, throughout all of time and space. Nothing will change that, not for a long time, if ever.

From an Integral perspective we can see why: everyone starts at ground zero. Everyone is born with basic survival instincts and must grow through the stages, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, etc. Growth usually stops at the society's center of gravity. A band of Bushmen may be at stage two, a street gang at stage three, a modern western nation like Australia at stage five, and a European socialist nation like Sweden at stage six. Groups like al-Qaeda or the Nazis are at stage three. While there are people at these different stages there will be conflicts between competing world views. Red always seeks to dominate, amber (blue) always seeks to stop red, and orange always seeks to use blue to stop red for its own benefit. This is just how things are.

Another possible interpretation, from the transpersonalists like Stan Groff, is to point to the personality of the trickster. The trickster aspect of reality is that which creates conflict in the world. The trickster creates novelty in Spirit, and novelty is percieved as conflict, even though in ultimate reality it is really done as an act of love. Conflict brings us a reason to be compassionate at times and in ways that we normally would not.

Those who took up arms and made sacrifices are the reason I can sit here and write about ponies and transpersonal psychology. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Freedom is bought and paid for in blood. Nothing I can do can ever repay those who made that sacrifice, but because of their kindness and generosity I never will have to, for their sacrifice is an act of compassion, given free of charge. Sometimes amber simply must confront red, even if the results are never pretty.

I don't think it is a mistake that the only people who recieved a grave memorial in Sparta were men who died in combat and women who died in childbirth, as they are the only among us who have made the ultimate sacrifice. For as many negative aspects of Spartan society may have existed, this aspect of memorialising fallen heroes deserves to be emulated and preserved. Let us never forget the sacrifice of patriots.

While you and I sit at home, isolated from the world outside, and while you celebrate with cocktails and La Cucaracha, take at least a moment to reflect on why you are free to act like a jackass. It is because someone picked up arms and went to fight evil that you are free to act as you do. Patriots are our treasure, treat them as such. Remember them even if it is for one minute, on this one day, once a year. Heroes are a thankless bunch. Take time to appreciate them, if only to the minimum degree.

From the bottom of my heart, to all those who serve, I extend my utmost thanks. My thanks is not much, but it is all I have to give, and I give it in vast quantities. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

Enoch Strife
Writing for The Urban Mystic
30 May 2011
5:40 PM

Equestria Girls Extended Version

2011-05-27T19:29:00.006-04:00

If you're not prepared you may explode twice! If you are prepared you definitely will!

Bronies finally get recognition!

This aired on The Hub (the television network Hasbro owns) on 28 May! It was very exciting seeing this video released officially on television.