Sunday, December 22, 2024
Saturday, December 21, 2024
Don´t tell Doreen Virtue
HA HA HA. I missed this little controversy in San Antonio, Texas. Both Catholics and Protestants were protesting a Krampus Night parade in the city, apparently the first one ever. In a weird statement, they extoll the virtues of Saint Nicholas and attack Krampus!
Eh, come again?
In Central Europe, including Catholic nations, Krampus (alias Black Peter) is the *helper* of Saint Nicholas on December 6. Yes, really. Should I or you tell the archbishop of San Antonio?
But OK, maybe the Krampus Night parade was anything but children-friendly, but surely there are worse problems in the Lone Star State...?
"Questions aheists can´t answer"
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| - We´re leaving this planet soon, just wait! |
So the terrorist in Germany is an *atheist from Saudi Arabia*, not a Muslim? Wonderful. Now US Christian fundamentalists can use his car attack as an argument against atheism. Should I or you tell them that he was supposedly also a Greater Israel Zionist and a Trump supporter?
This is just the latest example of "the world is going mad"...
Maybe its name is Grethe
"They burn people and eat human flesh". Just another Tuesday in Varanasi, I´m sure! All the usual chaos and mayhem in this video from a Danish guy who calls himself Adventure-Jones. Viewer discretion factor? Yuge!
Craziest line: when Adventure-Jones sees a human cranium packed up by an Aghori from his sack, my man exclaims: "Maybe its name is Grethe"?! (Grethe is a female Danish name.)
Dude.
LARP-ing left
It just struck me that the radical left must be very happy right now. I mean, doesn´t the world look pretty much like the left wants it to?
There is a green transition. Nuclear power plants are closed. Neo-colonialism is crumbling, while Russia and China have emerged as the dominant great powers. Muslim fundamentalism is on the rise. There has been mass immigration to Europe and the United States. The economy is run on crypto-Keynesian lines, with massive printing of money and what not. Veganism and euthanasia have become socially accepted. LGBTQ is the law of the land. Indeed, the entire White "race" is literally dying out. So are the Japanese and South Koreans, those darn East Asian sell-outs.
So why isn´t anyone celebrating? I mean, the radicals seem just as angry as usual.
Obviously because the world isn´t really leftist. It´s just LARP-ing left. The global situation looks like a simulacrum or even a parody of the Utopia the leftists were contending for.
The "irony of history" is palpable.
France leaves Afreaka?
Another setback for France in Africa. This time, French troops are preparing to leave Chad, and Senegal might be next. The French has already been kicked out of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. France will thus lose control over the entire Sahel! Russia will step in, obviously.
Still, sure wonder what the longterm plan is from the African side? Here´s a guess: their military elites will gladly accept Russian handouts, while continuing to send their population surplus to Europe (including France). Who knows, the plan might even work.
If it doesn´t...well, I suppose African conscripts can be airlifted to some war front in the ex-Soviet Union to aid the North Koreans. Something tells me they won´t like that very much, though.
From the frying pan into the fire!
Reflection
What´s the difference between folklore and fakelore? Isn´t folklore simply fakelore that survived longer?
Friday, December 20, 2024
Did I get this right?
Did Trump just demand that the debt ceiling be raised or scrapped? So *Trump* is the guy demanding more and more federal spending? Is that correctly understood? And most Republicans...what? Support him?
Everyone on X is laughing at this right now! Maybe the Dems should vote for his proposals, LOL.
Folklore in the making
Our bro Thomas Sheridan doubles down on the claim that the drones over New Jersey are really fairies, tulpas or something to that effect. In other words: a genuine paranormal event. It´s also folklore emerging right before our eyes.
Interesting, to be sure, but I suspect it´s just the usual all-American "will to believe". You say it, we believe it! People going ga-ga over normal commercial or police drones. That kind of stuff.
But we´ll see. Maybe...
Daring
This is a summary of a video I linked to previously. Daring move to claim that the Christmas tree isn´t pagan this close to, you know, Christmas...
HANDS OFF OUR IRMINSUL, CHARLEMAGNE, YOU!
Regression to the mean
Africa and Papua New Guinea still have a fertility rate above replacement level. Be afraid, White boy, be very afraid! :D
Oh, and the third clip shows one of "our" Western cultural deviations...
Veckans Strasser
Lite oväntat går utmärkelsen till Donald Tusk, Polens västvänlige mittenliberale premiärminister, und so weiter.
Än är Polen inte förlorat!
Polens förra regering kan åtalas - för att ha öppnat gränsen
The Great Disappointment
Is the drone scare winding down as we speak? That was that, then. Next time: black helicopters! Or no?
Thursday, December 19, 2024
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
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| Not a good likeness |
Or rather from a Utah ghost town. Or whatever was there 47 million years ago. A huge lake ecosystem near active volcanoes, perhaps?
A fossil plant stumps scientists, since it doesn´t seem to belong to any known family or genus, extant or extinct. Not sure why that´s news, tbh, but there you go.
I assume it was the scientific name of the darn thing (which supposedly means "alien plant") that caught the attention of the media. Can tie-ins to the drone scare be made here...?
"Alien plant" fossil stumps scientists
"Where are the guns, Nathan?"
Could become a classic. Globe earther calls flat earther from Antarctica, while taping the whole thing. From "The Final Experiment" (TFE), I assume.
I saw the sun at midnight
There is a lot of videos like this on YouTube just now, documenting the ongoing contretemps of the flat earthers who took a trip to Antarctica only to discover that...ooops...the Earth isn´t flat, after all. Or rather: the "predictions" (such as they are) of the flat earth "model" (such as it is) were proven wrong. In the most common flat earth model, the sun is very small and moves above the earth disk in such a way that a 24-hour sun would be impossible in Antarctica. Indeed, the Antarctic landmass itself doesn´t exist, being an ice wall all around the disk.
But the flat earthers who bravely went to the Seventh Continent eventually realized that the "midnight sun" is real, that Antarctica is there, and that even conspiracy theorists can visit it without being zapped by NASA´s clone warriors (or whoever they think is guarding the Ice Wall). GPS tracking in real time proves they are there, not at some staged location closer to Hollywood.
Of course, the flat earth non-society will come up with all kinds of excuses for the failure of their predictions. Indeed, they already have, some prominents in this milieu declaring before the expedition even launched that there is no flat earth model to begin with (!) and hence no predictions to disprove...
Besides, we all know that flat earth itself is a conspiracy to distract attention from *hollow* earth. There!
The final experiment
In a previous blog post, I mentioned that one Will Duffy, a Christian minister in California, was going to organize "the final experiment" to prove that the Earth is (surprise!) a globe. The flat earthers themselves say that if their model is correct, there can´t be a 24-hour sun in Antarctica. So Duffy offered to take the most vociferous flat earthers on an expedition to Antarctica (all expenses paid) so show them the midnight sun. Only a handful took him up on the offer, and it seems they are down there as we speak.
One of the flat earthers even admitted a few days ago that, well, there actually is a 24-hour day close to the South Pole. The expedition also disproves at least two other conspiracy theories: that nobody is allowed to ever visit Antarctica, and that the continent is really an "Ice Wall". GPS tracking clearly shows that the expedition (including the participating flat earthers) *did* go to the icy landmass from Chile. Also, the whole thing was apparently shown live on YouTube.
So will the flat earth community change their minds? LOL. Of course they won´t. They have already accused the flat earthers who signed on of being "shills" and are coming up with various coping mechanisms in real time. For instance, that the "sun" is a hoax. Or that their model doesn´t really imply the impossibility of a 24-hour sunny day in the Antarctica. Or that it´s not important. Or whatever whenever whithersoever.
So don´t worry, the deboonking industry will stay in bizniz even after "the final experiment"...
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
More and more familiar
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| Credit: Guillaume Baviere |
I already linked to these before, but here we go again. A propos the creeping (or not so creeping) demographic crisis. The implications are downright staggering!
Ooops
It seems I forgot to make the "Third Sunday of Advent" posting. Well, whatever, here we go three days too late!
Mission to Mars
A call to order from Sabine Hossenfelder (again). Of course humanity can´t go to Mars, terraform it, or whatever. Elon Musk is simply bonkers. Or a grifter? Funny that comedian Bill Maher is the voice of reason on this one!
We´re stuck on this rock, guys. Deal with it. But then, it does seem to be the only rock in this part of infinite spacetime that can actually harbor life.
Imagine being stuck in a somewhat insecure dome far away on Mars. Shades of "Total Recall"...
Coping
Many of the Buddha´s teachings have been lost forever. Note the reactions in the commentary section! "You never explained what was lost". Eh, cuz it´s lost, bro. "What is left is sufficient". Eh, how do you know, since many teachings *and meditation techniques* were lost? My favorite: "Nothing was lost, we have the Pali Canon". While the comments aren´t as acerbic as when Christians and atheists fight it out (maybe meditation has *some* beneficial aspects), the whole thing still sounds like a cope.
Said with the reservation that I don´t know what this YouTube channel really stands for. Maybe in other videos *they* claim to have access to the lost teachings...
Which, I suppose, would also be a coping mechanism of sorts.
The arrival of Siegfried
Our man JMG continues his analysis of Richard Wagner´s seminal opera "The Nibelung´s Ring". Note the comments on child psychology and alternative schooling!
Between New Jersey and Magonia
Thomas Sheridan comments the drone scare/invasion in the United States (its epicenter seems to be New Jersey) and reaches the conclusion that we´re dealing with a "Fortean" phenomenon, by which he means that the drones are in some sense paranormal.
Whatever these entities are, they mimic earthly drones (compare how the Men in Black try in vain to look like real humans), suggesting a fairy-like quality. Sheridan references Vallée, Keel and Jung. The latter speculated that in some sense UFOs might be "our" creations. A disturbance in the Collective Unconscious? Perhaps the tension after Trump´s election victory in strange ways affects Earth´s energy signature, giving rise to fake drones in the sky?
Of course, a more mundane explanation is that tense people are going ga-ga and misidentify perfectly normal drones. Or it´s the USAF testing a newly minted model, hence the strenous denials from Big Government...
Autism increases (literally)
Dr John Campbell´s latest video is somewhat eclectic, featuring both a discussion about autism, Trump´s comments on eliminating the "middleman" from the medical industry and...the same Trump commenting the drone invasion in New Jersey and elsewhere?!
The dramatic increase in autism among children seems to be real. Something similar has been observed in Sweden (since 2010). And no doubt in many other nations, too. Not mentioned by Campbell is the equally steep growth of kids and teens diagnosed with "gender dysphoria" (since about 2012). There could be a connection.
Is the increase real, or is it just Big Pharma and Big Shrink inventing new diagnoses as they go along for reasons of profit? Campbell and his new hero RFK Jr believe it´s a real thing. Campbell says its connected to "lifestyle changes", but doesn´t elaborate. Maybe he doesn´t know, maybe it´s the YouTube censorship. Hint: if the latter, he probably believes it´s the vaxx.
Trump, somewhat ironically, doesn´t take an anti-vaxx position in his televized comments, explicitly defending the polio vaccine. Note also that Trump says he, RFK and Oz had dinner with Pfizer´s CEO!
Either way, the truth will hurt if and when it will become known. Add to that the demographic crisis and you have a rough (pun intended) picture of the century ahead...
Tuesday, December 17, 2024
The government denies knowledge
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| Just another day in Jersey City! |
Let´s see if this approach works better, LOL. Probably not. So the crypto-Iranian super-drones spotted in a number of US states lately are just misidentified Plain & Old Fashioned 9-to-5 drones, and hence not even new gadgets c/o Skunkworks! I mean, I think I saw one here in Sweden the other night?! In other words, it´s simply another example of "the world gone mad" since the POTUS elections.
Kind of annoying that it would end on this boring note, I mean, at the very least it would be great fun to watch some half-crazed vigilante types (in NJ of all places) downing what´s actually classified CIA hardware!
Heck, I suppose I have to go back reading tedious academic papers on Tibetan Buddhism, sheeeesh.
Drone-spotting
Michael Tracey (the roving reporter) tries to keep his head cool while drone-spotting in his home state of New Jersey in the dead of night. And yes, he saw two of the darn things, one of them relatively close (as drones fly) to a military facility!
Weird thing: I actually saw something which may or may not have been a "drone" (with the blinking red and green lights!) from my house in the middle of the night a couple of days (or nights) ago. I have never seen anything like it before. And since I live in Sweden, I assume this isn´t one of the NJ flying machines making a little detour...
Maybe Iran (or I-Ran as that Texas congressman calls it) has another mothership firmly anchored in the Baltic Sea, somewhere next to the Nordstream pipeline? Or it really is the fairies. Per usual.
Drones and mass hysteria: an inquest
A Christmas epiphany
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| - Yuletide, bro? What on earth is yuletide?! |
Some slightly unedited reflections on the pagan nature of Christmas…
On one level, the question is academic, since virtually all “really
existing” Christmas traditions in the modern Western world seem to be Christian
or secularized, and many regardless of nominal provenance were invented by
enterprising retailers or wholesalers. Some during my lifetime! That being
said, it´s hard not to believe that there is a connection between the Christian
idea that Jesus was born on December 25 (not found in the Bible) and earlier
pagan conceptions.
December 25 was the original date of the winter solstice in the Julian
calendar, adopted in Rome on January 1, 45 BC by order of Julius Caesar
himself. In other words, before Christianity even existed. Later, the winter solstice
became associated with the imperial solar deity Sol Invictus, probably first
worshipped by Emperor Aurelian during the 3rd century AD. Constantine
the Great originally promoted both Christianity and the cult of Sol Invictus,
presumably for reasons of politic, but dropped the solar cult after the Council
of Nicaea. The supposedly super-Christian emperor Theodosius the Great used
pagan imagery (Hercules) to justify his rule, and modeled himself on Trajan showing
that Christian-pagan “syncretism” was a thing. It´s interesting to note that
Macrobius claimed that Sol Invictus was depicted as a small child at the winter
solstice (compare baby Jesus). While Macrobius is a late source (5th
century AD), Plutarch (1st century AD and hence not influenced by
Christianity) said that Harpocrates was born on the winter solstice. This is
the Hellenistic form of the Egyptian god Horus, son of Isis and Osiris. Note
the iconographic similarity between Mary holding baby Jesus and Isis holding
Horus.
Oh, and then there´s the similarities between the Saturnalia and later
Christmas traditions, including the Feast of Fools and the Lord of Misrule. Indeed,
Christmas was long associated with folkish revelry rather than Christian
solemnity (except, I suppose, in church). It´s not a co-incidence that that the
17th century Puritans in both England and New England tried to ban
many customs associated with Christmas!
So why is it far fetched to think that the Christian Church consciously “captured”
December 25 as the birthday of Jesus in order to compete with the pagans? The
alternative “calculation hypothesis” says that the Christians arrived at the
date of December 25 by simply calculating nine months from March 25 (the Roman
date of the spring equinox) since Jesus was believed to have been conceived by
the Holy Ghost on that day. An alternative calculation from April 6 gave January
6 as the date of Christ´s birth instead, long celebrated in the eastern half of
the Roman Empire (today, January 6 is the Christian holiday of Epiphany). However,
it turns out that this seemingly random date is *also* associated with paganism,
making it highly unlikely that the Christians chose it by chance.
Let´s begin with Epiphanius, the somewhat notorious 4th
century AD Christian bishop and heresy-hunter extraordinaire. In his “Panarion”,
Epiphanius claims that Jesus was born on January 6 and that the pagans therefore
celebrate their mystery rites on that date to deceive the faithful. Christian
apologists rather naively assume that Epiphanius is of course telling the truth,
and that the pagans were indeed mimicking the Christian traditions. But we will
see later that this is highly unlikely. First, a short summary of what the
Cypriot bishop writes. At January 6, the pagans in Alexandria celebrate the virgin
birth of Aion from Kore (which, of course, means “The Virgin” or “The Maiden”).
On the same date, the pagans in Petra celebrate of the virgin birth of one Dusares
from Kore. Also, there is a similar celebration in Elusa (presumably the town
in Palestine), but it´s not described by the bishop.
According to pre-Christian Greek sources, Persephone is the mother of
Dionysus Zagreus, who is dismembered by the Titans and then brought to life. Persephone
and Kore is the same goddess, but in this particular myth, Dionysus isn´t born
of a virgin. Rather, Persephone is impregnated by Zeus. The Greeks and Romans
often identified Dionysus with Osiris, another god who was dismembered and
brought back to life. Aion – the miraculous son of Kore in Epiphanius´ account –
was a syncretic deity identified with Dionysus and Osiris! Dusares was
sometimes also associated with Dionysus. Thus, everything points to Dionysus. Could
January 6 somehow have been associated with the god of wine? Indeed, this seems
to be the case.
Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) and Pausanias (2nd
century AD) – both men highly unlikely to have been influenced by Christianity – mention a Dionysiac festival on January 6, known as Theodosia, during
which the water at a holy spring at the island of Andros was turned into wine.
The ability of Dionysus to turn water into wine is of course well attested from
other sources, too. Seneca (1st century AD) associates Dionysus with
a wedding feast. Finally, Dionysus was worshipped in Scythopolis in Palestine,
indeed, the local pagans claimed this was the god´s birthplace. And in the
Gospel of John, Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding at Cana, which is close
to Scythopolis…
It seems difficult to deny that the author of the gospel modelled this
somewhat peculiar miracle of Jesus on Dionysiac traditions. Epiphanius gives
the whole game away when he states that Jesus performed the miracle of turning
water into wine on the same date as his birth – that is, January 6 *which is
also the birthday of Dionysus according to the same author*. Epiphanius also writes
that on January 6, the water in many streams and rivers turn into wine as evidence
of Christ´s miracle at Cana. He mentions the Nile, Cibyre in Caria and Gerasa
in Arabia. *But this is exactly what Pliny and Pausanias claims happened on
January 6 on Andros at the Dionysiac festival of Theodosia*.
It´s therefore obvious what´s going on here. Both December 25 and January
6 were days honoring pagan gods, and both were claimed by the Christian Church after
Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire. At some point, December
25 was fixed as the birthday of Jesus, while January 6 became Epiphany, still
in a sense associated with the Christ´s birth. In the Western Church, Epiphany celebrates the Magi and their adoration of the infant Jesus, while in the
Eastern Church, it celebrates the baptism of Jesus (a symbolic “birth”).
So it seems Christmas is “pagan”, after all. At least after a fashion!
Monday, December 16, 2024
In vino veritas
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| Credit: Carole Raddato |
We´ll soon resume our regular programming, but I can´t help quoting this! I mean, wtf?!
>>>Importantly, Greeks and Romans often erroneously identified the Jewish god with Dionysus. (Indeed, the Hebrew Bible did portray Yahweh was, among other things, a wine god, and Yahweh required daily wine offerings to him. E.g., Exodus 29:40; Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:14-15.)
>>>The Roman historian Tacitus said that some people erroneously thought that the Jews worship Father Liber (Dionysus/Bacchus) since their priests intoned to the flute and cymbals and wore ivy garlands, and because a golden grapevine decorated the entrance to the Jerusalem temple (Histories, 5.5). (Such priestly practices were not normal in Judaism but perhaps did occur during the above-mentioned aberrations; the grapevine decoration did appear on the temple that Herod built. Josephus, Antiquities, 15.11.395).
>>>In Plutarch’s Table Talk, the dining partners thought that the Jews worshipped Dionysus. As evidence, they pointed to the Jewish wine harvest festival, a festival procession in which people enter the temple each carrying a thyrsus, noisemaking and music making by worshippers, the High Priest wearing a fawnskin (like followers of Dionysus), and a “carved thyrsus” on the pediment of the temple (Moralia, 671C-672C).
>>>In 139 BCE, since, as noted, Romans erroneously thought that the Jews living in Rome worshipped the god Sabazius, who was equated with Dionysus, the Jews were expelled from Rome, since the authorities considered the cult of Sabazius (and Bacchic mysteries generally) pernicious and corrupting. Given that many gentiles were so inclined to equate the Jewish god with Dionysus, it would make sense for John to engage that audience in Dionysian terms while turning the argument to Jesus’s advantage.
Xmas is pagan
Yes, Christmas is pagan. Deal with it. Just wait until I tell you where Epiphany comes from...
Drone memetic warfare
One of the more popular memes right now. President-elect Donald Trump mocks his former ally turned enemy Chris Christie with a meme showing how drones bring the latter some hamburgers!
Purport: Christie is a former governor of New Jersey. The drone scare began in that state. One drone supposedly crashed outside a McDonald´s. Christie was notoriously obese during his tenure as governor, and almost died during the COVID pandemic due to this, so the meme isn´t particularly classy...
On a more serious note, Christie recently commented the drone situation, having no particular solution to it, but expressing fear that unless something is done, vigilantes will start shooting down drones at their own leisure, which will impede legitimate drone traffic. Both law enforcement and commercial businesses use drones, after all.
Of course, if somebody actually downs an "Iranian" drone, this will force the USAF´s hand, since the little trinkets are obviously theirs.
Sunday, December 15, 2024
No drones in this one
The content-creator whose channel is called Lifting the Lamp discusses his experiences with UFOs and alien entities. He has carried out Steven Greer´s CE-5 protocol with succesful results. I admit that the experiences he describes are...weird.
Probably just a co-incidence that this was posted in the middle of the US drone scare (the channel is Australian). Something tells me those drones aren´t as spiritual as the alien orbs observed by Lifting the Lamp!
Big Crunch
Have no idea what the German mama is on about here, but it seems that a team of mathematicians have proved (maybe) that math can´t calculate everything and that reductionism doesn´t work.
So humans will never know everything and reality is emergence all the way down? Is that what you´re saying?
I came to that conclusion without math, but YMMV.
Just another Tuesday in Jerusalem
"Resurrection Tomb" is a 2012 documentary based on the 2011 book "The Jesus Discovery" by American scholar James Tabor and Israeli-Canadian film maker Simcha Jacobovici. It tells the tale of an intensely controversial archeological excavation in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Jacobovici is associated with the so-called Jesus Family Tomb at Talpiot. He and his team believes that Mary Magdalene was buried there, that she may have been the wife of Jesus, and that their son Judah is also interred in the tomb. None of which is Biblical, although it does square well with "The Da Vinci Code"! Nearby, quite literally under a residential building, is the so-called Second Tomb, the focus of the present documentary.
Jacobovici had to fight an uphill battle to excavate the Second Tomb. Bureaucratic red tape, militant Orthodox Jewish activists, and the residents of the house on top of the tomb all tried to stop the dig at various points. The situation was almost surreal. At one point, a man owning a flat in the house demand that the archeologists abort their mission with the argument that he won´t be able to sell his home since nobody wants to live on top of a grave! A rather bizarre claim since it´s never been a secret what was underneath the house...
Oh, and Simcha believes that Jesus was buried in the Second Tomb. I think *somebody* even in Jerusalem would love to buy a condo right above the world´s most famous archeological site (if such it is).
After negotiating with the Orthodox Jewish rabbi, the team gets permission for a "non-intrusive" investigation, which means that they can´t remove anything from the tomb, only take moving pictures with the help of a camera fastened on a robotic arm. At least, they can see art and inscriptions at the ossuaries. Tabor believes that the tomb contains two Christian symbols: the cross and Jonah escaping from the bowels of the big fish. He rather daringly interprets an inscription on one of the ossuaries as "Jesus, Jesus, Rise, Rise". The idea is that the bones of *Jesus himself* were placed in the bone-box, making the inscription an invocation to *him* to rise again!
Needless to say, these findings have not been universally accepted. It seems most archeologists reject both the "big fish" and Tabor´s reading of the invocation.
In other words: Just another Tuesday in Biblical archeology.
The smartest man in the world
While this video (from the YouTube channel Formscapes) is nominally a polemic against "Professor Dave", it´s actually about the history of science, the nature of scientific theories and (to some extent) also about Chris Langan´s speculations. Langan, mostly known for reportedly having an IQ of 200, has developed his own "Theory of Everything" known as the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU). I don´t claim to understand it, but at a cursory glance, Langan´s system sounds like an attempted synthesis of pantheism and theism. Formscapes makes comparisons to both Neoplatonism and Whitehead´s process philosophy.
The video isn´t easy to follow, but the main point seems to be that those who reject the CTMU doesn´t even understand what it is. It´s not a scientific theory generating testable hypotheses, but rather a metaphysical model explaining how scientific theories are possible at all. Which raises the question why we would need metaphysics in the first place? Why not simply have testable scientific hypotheses and be done with it?
Formscapes believes that modern science has moved further and further away from reality, into a kind of la-la-land of increasingly illusory and absurd theories, nominally accepted because "the math works" but actually because of the institutional power that comes with this kind of scientism. In the real world, modern cosmology is empirically falsified at every step (the example mentioned in the video is how "dark matter" is used to save the Big Bang). This seems to be more or less true. But what should be done about it? For Formscapes, the solution is a return to metaphysics. Hence his interest in the CTMU.
Personally, I would rather make science even more empirical than it currently is. How about replacing Einstein´s theory of relativity with a theory that isn´t "perspectival"? I suppose Formscapes would argue that even such a science needs metaphysical grounding, but why really? Why can´t our experiences simply ground themselves? After all, that´s what they actually do, in the really real world...
Saturday, December 14, 2024
On the mothership of lies
LOL. The drone BS continues. Now, Donald Trump wants the government to tell the people...or shoot down the darn things. But some pundit on TV said that the drone problematique started already in 2017. Was the talking head initiated or merely opinionated? We have no information, but guess who was POTUS in 2017!
I´m relatively convinced that the drones are "ours", so if they suddenly stop coming after the inauguration, we´ll know Trump told the USAF to stop testing them so blatantly over urban agglomerations and, I suppose, McDonald´s fast food restaurants.
But sure, I suppose it´s a distant possibility that Iran is testing its entire top notch drone fleet over US territory, fully secure that not a single one of their trinkets will be shot down or captured, and then retro-engineered at Area 51 and shared with Israel...
Yeah, I´m sure that´s the most likely explanation.
Glowing in the dark
I think it was Mattias Gardell who said that the three most common accusations hurled by neo-Nazis in the US against each other are "you are gay", "you are really Jewish" or "you are a FBI agent". Gardell also added that surprisingly often, the accusations turn out to be true...
And here we go again. For whatever reason, the Patriot Front is constantly accused of being "glowies" and "Feds" by other groups on the Alt Right. The first article linked below is parody, but does capture the sentiment.
I have about zero interest in the Patriot Front, but they certainly seem to act in very amateurish manner. From the SPLC´s article:
>>>Like other hate and extremist groups, the need to recruit and grow their members makes PF a target for antifascist activists who attempt to infiltrate white nationalist groups to expose and disrupt their activities. Since 2018, antifascist activists have infiltrated PF at least five times, which has led to journalist and activist networks obtaining thousands of documents, including internal chat logs, audio and video recordings, and photographs. The laxed operational security measures of PF that are responsible for these infiltrations led to the identification of more than 130 current and former members since 2019.
>>>PF keeps records of members’ exercise regiments, weight, meeting attendance, event participation, and logs when a member attends events with affiliated white nationalist groups, such as the National Justice Party. Leaders publicly and privately shame members who do not adhere to exercise routines, attend events, or do not purchase enough PF branded promotional material. According to leaked documents, members are expected to post of certain number of racist flyers and banners per months. Patriot Front members purchase PF branded flyers, stickers, and stencils from Rousseau at a premium.
>>>Despite efforts to conceal their identities, antifascists and researchers have identified approximately 120 individuals as former or current Patriot Front members, many of whom lost their jobs after their membership in an organized hate group was revealed.
>>>According to leaked private chat logs, phone calls and documents obtained by Unicorn Riot, Rousseau requires Patriot Front members to purchase branded stickers, stencils, patches and clothing items. Members are often directed to purchase clothing from an affiliated online store, Will2Rise.
Apparently, they even publicly disclose where the flyers have been passed out! Anyone with an IQ above 25 understands that a group of this type will be mapped and/or infiltrated. Even the fact that they (rather flamboyantly) mask up at marches really functions as an identifying marker.
Some far left groups and Black nationalists also act like this. Funny that it´s always the most extreme ones, the ones that openly tell the world about the need to form Baader Meinhof-type urban guerilla units! But sure, it doesn´t have to be a COINTELPRO operation, it could simply be a narcissistic leader who wants a picturesque personality cult around himself, with zero intention of actually making any "revolution". Which, I suppose, might be just as well...
Parody article about the Patriot Front
DRONE INVASION
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| AI´s dramatic take on a drone fleet above New Jersey! |
Geezus, I´ve been looking at YouTube clips (often from local news broadcasts) and it seems the United States is *lit* at the moment. EVERYONE IS SEEING THE DRONES. The flap has now extended to at least half a dozen states, the westernmost being Indiana. A reporter saw 50 of them over New Jersey in just one night and even filmed two of them?! A talking head on TV claims that this stuff has been ongoing since 2017, yet none have ever been captured or shot down...
Et cetera.
No idea what´s going on, obviously. I suppose it could be a ChiCom or Russian intelligence operation, but more likely explanations include mass hysteria (I mean, people in NJ see the Jersey Devil on a semi-regular basis), mad engineering dorks testing little trinkets in their spare time, USAF finally getting their drone acts together, or MK-Ultra psy-opping everyone in the Lower 48.
Probably not the fairies, then. And most certainly not aliens, either.
Chill, guyz. They are yours!
Pepparkaksvisan
Lucia tog ju slut för ganska exakt sju minuter sedan, men här lyckas AI faktiskt göra en hyfsad bild av barn utklädda till pepparkakor! Fast hattarna är fel, förstås. De ska ju vara på sne...
Friday, December 13, 2024
Litmus test
Donald Trump wants to abolish Daylight Savings Time! Let´s see if the Don can at least keep *this* promise. Litmus test for the entire upcoming Administration?
Ihjälkramade?
SD är årets stora förlorare i opinionsmätningarna, Miljöpartiet (något oväntat) vinnaren. Oppositionen leder klart över Tidöpartierna, trots att SAP faktiskt också går dåligt. Länkar till Fria Tider och SVT Nyheter.
Elprischocken och matpriserna (som går upp igen) lär ju inte ge regeringen några stilpoäng heller, om man säger så.
Drones are the new UFOs
Drones are the new UFOs. I mean that quite literally. The parallels between the ongoing "drone flap" in New Jersey and the classical UFO phenomenon are staggering. And even somewhat fascinating!
High altitude drones with previously unseen capabilities, the government denies knowledge, "I know what I saw", that kind of thing. Except that this time around, nobody blames aliens but rather an "Iranian drone mothership" somewhere off the East Coast.
Soon, they will blame aliens, just wait.
Biden White House dismisses mystery drone sightings
The Gospel of Talpiot
"Jesus, the mystery of his descendents" is a documentary recently shown on SVT (Swedish public service TV). Weirdly, I can´t seem to find any information about it on the web. It seems to be French or Franco-Belgian, featuring both French-speaking and English-speaking scholars and independent researchers. The date of release is unknown to me.
While the docu has a skeptical undertone, it is surprisingly even-handed. Both mainline scholars and mavericks are able to speak without interruption. Purely by chance, the documentary premiered on SVT the same week as another network showed "The Da Vinci Code" on prime time. OK, let me guess. Jesus is the reason for the season?
The focus is on two controversial discoveries relating to Jesus: "The Gospel of Jesus´ Wife" and the Talpiot family tomb. Both could be interpreted as suggesting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The "gospel" is a tiny fragment in Coptic, but it could be read that Jesus had a wife and that women could be disciples. The fragment was presented to the public by professor Karen L King, but many believe that it´s a forgery. The main suspect is the fragment´s original owner, Walter Fritz. He denies it and isn´t interviewed in the documentary.
The Talpiot tomb is promoted by Simcha Jacobovici, an Israeli film-maker who worked with James Cameron and James Tabor. The tomb contains ossuaries which supposedly contained the remains of Jesus, James, Mary Magdalene, Matthew, John and a son of Jesus named Judah. Among others! The whole thing is perhaps a bit too good to be true, but Jacobovici defends his hypothesis ably enough. If he is right, Jesus was both married, had children and...never resurrected (unless we re-interprete whatever that even means).
"Jesus, the mystery of his descendents" might not be the most interesting production around, but it could work as a teaser trailer to the broader problematique surrounding these issues...
Magisk realism
Netflix har tydligen gjort en TV-serie av "Hundra år av ensamhet". Kultureliten är lyrisk. "Jag kan inte vara den ende som är entusiastisk" säger en kulturskribent på en viss kvällstidning.
Eh?
Jag kan garantera att 99,99% av svenska folket aldrig har hört talas om Gabriel García Márquez. Jag har förstås gjort det. Gubben som tog emot nobelpriset i litteratur klädd i pyjamas.
Har dock läst Miguel Asturias...
:P
Ljusklar hägring
Har alltså haft problem med att få AI att avbilda det svenska Lucia-firande. Ovanstående är det som kommer närmast...
Thursday, December 12, 2024
Secrets of the Priory
Oh no, not again! A Swedish TV network is showing "The Da Vinci Code" as we speak. This is my old review from Amazon, probably posted circa 2008, and here on the blog in 2018. Reposted for the hell of it!
Recently, no-longer-so-Red China prohibited the movie "The Da Vinci Code", after only two weeks of airing. Thank God. At least there is some Western trash the Chinese audience don't have to endure. Apparently, the movie have also been banned at the Faroe Islands (of all places). Once again: Thank you.
Although the movie slightly downplays the most controversial claims in Dan Brown's novel, the basic message is still the same. All these ideas have been refuted by serious scholars (including secular ones) long ago. Jesus was not married to Mary Magdalene and didn't sire children with her. Constantine didn't invent the Christian Bible. In fact, all or most of the New Testament (NT) was written 200 years earlier. Nor was Constantine the first to declare Jesus a God. His purported divinity is spelled out already in the NT, most clearly in the Gospel of John, written around AD 100. The Gnostic gospels, in which Mary Magdalene is portrayed as the chief disciple of Jesus, were written long after the NT Gospels. Besides, the Gnostics also regarded Jesus as divine! Et cetera.
Thus, the movie doesn't expose any cover-up. Rather, it and Dan Brown's novel are themselves part of a cover-up. Brown wants to replace one religious myth (the Christian) with another (his own). I'm not a Christian, but the Church is at least a public institution, with a public message. Dan Brown's alternative is presumably a secret sex cult, carrying out bizarre rituals reminescent of Satanic ritual abuse, and led by a Grand Master with a penchant for pentagrams and other Satanist paraphernalia. In the movie, the members of this secret society, "The Priory of Zion", are depicted as the good guys. By contrast, "The Teacher", who wants to expose both the Church and the Priory, thereby ending ALL conspiracies for good, is one of the bad guys!
In fact, I found Teabing or the Teacher to be the only sympathetic person in the entire movie, a sort of expose-em-all David Icke character (and I must admit that I don't usually like Icke).
Incidentally, who engineered the car accident that killed Sophie's father and mother anyway? The movie never says, but we are left with the impression that it might have been the Priory after all. Thus, the "good" guys.
So the muckracker is the bad guy, and the secret manipulative Satanic cult are not really Satanists at all, but jolly nice people. Oh yeah? So why do they operate in secret, then? Obviously, because they have something to hide, not only from "the council of shadows", but from the rest of us as well. It might be well to remember that many of the ideas in Dan Brown's novel originally comes from Pierre Plantard, a French right-wing extremist. Besides, the conspiracy theory of history is usually associated with the far right of the political spectrum. These essentially elitist and fascist ideas have then been neatly edited into a vaguely "New Age" version and voila, we have "The Da Vinci Code".
Make no mistake about it. "The Da Vinci Code" might be a bad movie, but the ideas behind it are even worse. Not just for the odd traditional Christian, but for all of us. Sincerely, do you want a world ruled by the Priory of Zion? If forced to chose, I rather go with the most boring, philistine Anglican vicar!
Survivors
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| Credit: Guillaume Baviere |
So I just watched the second episode of "Sveriges hav" (The Seas of Sweden), and it seems most of it actually is about, you know, Sweden. The first episode was about the Shetland Islands?! The sequel has the subtitle "Östersjöns överlevare" (Survivors of the Baltic Sea). Gotland is featured, but a Danish island has also been sneaked in, and who knows what else.
Not sure if anyone even survived this extravaganza of various animals munching on each other. Starfish attacking clams, herring gulls swooping down on eider ducklings, the Gotland subspecies of grass snake hunting for fish in the sea...but also seals generally basking in the sun, waiting for better times. You get the picture. There are also enormous populations of moon jellies in the Baltic Sea, apparently a problem since they eat too much (and hence presumably out-compete the fish eaten by humans).
It seems Lake NATO is really a gigantic smorgasbord! May it survive for the benefit of future hungry generations, and so forth.
Update
What´s up with the red heifer situation? This update is from early August. Have the Jewish fundamentalists backed down? Or did animal rights activists rescue their poor cows?
Israelis practice red heifer ritual in front of Al-Aqsa Mosque
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
A new word, a new world
I learned a new term today: "drone mothership". There is a drone scare as we speak in New Jersey, with claims that Iran has a "drone mothership" off the coast. One of the menacing drones crashed right outside a McDonald´s?!
Reminds me of the Chinese spy balloons. Or the UFO disclosure business.
Ours?
Alawite dawn, Alawite dusk
Two interesting threads on Syria on X, believe it or not! Note that the Assad family were themselves Alawites. The Alawites are a small Shia Muslim sect whose members have historically been poor and oppressed.
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