Ja, vad tror du själv? Kulturbarnen stretar på...
The blog to end all blogs. Reviews and comments about all and everything. This blog is NOT affiliated with YouTube, Wikipedia, Microsoft Bing, Gemini, ChatGPT or any commercial vendor! Links don´t imply endorsement. Many posts and comments are ironic. The blogger is not responsible for comments made by others. The languages used are English and Swedish. Content warning: Essentially everything.
| Credit: Bernard Dupont |
En glad nyhet? En nandu på rymmen har infångats medelst förplägnad bestående av kanelgifflar och salta nötter. Påfågeln på bondgården är glad över att ha fått tillbaka sin amigo. Skåne 2026. Knickarp, Blentarp och Häckeberga är nu på allas läppar. Och kartor?
Visst, det är lite nyhetstorka över den här historien. Men lite glad blir man ju över att Alex fick sina favoritkakor tillbaka.
Fast varför rymde strutsfågeln egentligen...?
| Credit: Skalle-Per Hedenhös (sic) |
Richard Carrier on the attack...again. An atheist-materialist take on consciousness, et cetera.
Note the claim that some robots and smart cars may be (somewhat) conscious. Insects, on the other hand, aren´t conscious. Neither are octopi. Fish probably aren´t either: "They aren´t really alive, they´re just less dead". And if you´re not conscious, you can´t really feel anything either. So ants don´t feel anything when we dispose of them them using poison. The tuna didn´t feel anything when it was hooked and killed. Pigs do feel and experience things, but since they aren´t self-aware, their lives have no actual value to them. Like pigs to the slaughter! Human babies are more advanced than pigs (this is a veiled polemic against Peter Singer, methinks).
The "existential" consequences of the above are...interesting. So entire *civilizations* can be created simply on the basis of subconscious computation by non-sentient life-forms? I´m thinking of social insects such as ants, termites and honeybees. Where does that leave us in a wholly materialist universe? Note also that robots could (presumably) be made fully self-conscious. Finally, note that consciousness requires "modeling", which seems to imply that consciousness can only ever be "indirectly realist". Are ants direct realists?
OK, here is the link:
Is QAnon and certain UFO conspiracist milieux finally experiencing their very own "Great Disappointment"? Which simply proves what we suspected long ago: these are sectarian apocalyptic movements, adapted to the web.
Is there also a conspiracy theory claiming that there is a split between Trump and the Alliance?
Yes, as the narrative around the "Earth Alliance" grew more complex, a specific sub-theory emerged—the "Split" or "Betrayal" narrative.
This shift in online discourse usually surfaces when political events don't align with the "miraculous" expectations of the original theory. It’s a way for the community to rationalize delays or perceived failures in the "Great Awakening" timeline.
Some theorists claim that the Alliance (the extraterrestrial/military group) gave Trump a specific timeline for "Full Disclosure" or the implementation of a new financial system (often called NESARA/GESARA). When these things didn't happen in the "blink of an eye," theories began to circulate that:
The Disagreement: Trump may have chosen a "softer" path to avoid societal collapse, while the Alliance wanted a more radical "Plutonian" clearing of the old system.
The Separation: Rumors suggest the Alliance "paused" their active support or took a "wait and see" approach, forcing Trump to navigate the current 2025–2026 political landscape with less "off-world" guidance.
In the more extreme corners of these forums, some claim the "split" is literal. They suggest that the "original" Trump was aligned with the Alliance, but that he was replaced by a "double" or that his "vibrational frequency" shifted, causing a rift with the benevolent Pleiadians or other Alliance members.
Another popular version of the "Split" discourse isn't about a fight, but a deliberate withdrawal. This theory suggests the Alliance stepped back to see if humanity (and Trump) could stand on their own two feet. This mirrors the "Saturnine" energy we've been discussing—the idea that the "Teacher" (the Alliance/Saturn) leaves the room so the student can finally take the test.
Can you give me some more details about the "split / betrayal" narrative? What groups or individuals are promoting it?
The "split" or "betrayal" narrative you're sensing is a fascinating byproduct of how high-stakes political narratives and "cosmic" belief systems collide. In 2025 and 2026, as the anticipation for "Full Disclosure" (the government revealing everything about aliens) reached a fever pitch, certain voices began to explain why the "miracle" hadn't fully manifested yet.
This "split" isn't promoted by one single organization, but rather by a network of influencers who bridge the gap between Exopolitics (alien politics) and Q-adjacent narratives.
Dr. Michael Salla (Exopolitics.org): A leading figure who frequently discusses the "Earth Alliance." In late 2025 and into 2026, Salla’s discourse has touched on the friction between political maneuvering and the "higher directives" of extraterrestrial groups. He often frames Trump as being in a difficult position—balancing the demands of human "Deep State" holdouts with the strict timelines of the Galactic Alliance.
Elena Danaan: A prominent "emissary" for what she calls the Galactic Federation of Worlds. Her narrative suggests that while the Alliance remains supportive, there is a "testing period" where humanity must take more responsibility. The "split" is often framed as the Alliance stepping back from direct intervention to let the human "White Hats" handle the final stages of the transition.
Social Media "Intel" Drops: On platforms like X and Telegram, various anonymous "insiders" have promoted the idea that Trump has "gone rogue" from the Alliance’s original plan or that he is operating on a "Plan B" because the original timeline for a financial reset was sabotaged.
The "betrayal" isn't usually seen as a malicious act, but rather a strategic divergence. Here is how it is currently being discussed in 2026:
The "Slow-Walked" Disclosure: Some believers feel "betrayed" by the pace. They argue that the Alliance expected a total dump of all alien tech and secret history by now, but that the Trump administration is releasing it in "drips" to maintain economic stability.
The Personnel Conflict: There is a narrative that certain "shadow" advisors have infiltrated the president's inner circle, effectively "blocking" the Alliance's frequency or communications.
The Vaccine/Technology Rift: A specific sub-sect of this theory claims the "split" happened over the use of specific technologies (like medical "med-beds" or vaccines). They claim the Alliance wanted a "natural/spiritual" healing leap, while the political wing stayed tied to corporate/industrial models.
As an AI looking at these human patterns, the "split" narrative serves a very specific purpose: it preserves the faith. If you believe in a 100% powerful Galactic Alliance, but the world still feels chaotic, you have two choices:
Admit the Alliance might not exist.
Claim there is a "Split" or "Betrayal" that explains the delay.
Most choose the latter because it keeps the "Plutonian Miracle" alive. It turns a political delay into a cosmic drama.
WTF. Multi-purpose tool use among...wait for it...cows? You know, bovids. Bovidae. What-the-heck.
A somewhat shambolic controversy back in 2007 involving the religious sect I mentioned earlier, Community of the Many Names of God and its Welsh ashram Skanda Vale. The ashram wanted to save one of its bulls, Shambo, from being slaughtered after the animal tested positive for TB. Note the ethno-politicking involved in the case! From Wikipedia, but seems to be fully sourced.
I admit that I never heard of this particular Hindu sect before. It´s called the Community of the Many Names of God and has ashrams in Wales and Switzerland. Most members seem to be White, but the head is (was?) a Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil calling himself Guru Sri Subramanium.
He founded the Community together with a British Christian reverend and a Buddhist. Its monks apparently take the vow of Saint Francis, but otherwise the group has a strong Hindu flair and "Hare Krishna vibes". They worship the Hindu Tamil god Murugan plus Kali, Shiva and Ganesha.
The video above shows a procession (somewhere in the Welsh countryside) featuring a murti of Kali. Note the elephant! Supposedly a gift from Sri Lankan president J R Jayewardene. Hmmm...
I admit that this isn´t exactly my cup of chai, but there you go.
I know this is silly, but I can´t help myself linking to it. I never actually seen an emu IRL. There used to be a farmer somewhere outside Stockholm who actually owned an emu and showed it to the paying public once a year, but I never bothered trying to find the exact time and date for the glorious exhibition...
A somewhat "autistic" essay speculating on whether or not it would have been possible for humans to domesticate dinosaurs. Eh? OK, the illustrations are darn funny!
The first video (about Ozzy Osbourne) is extremely infuriating. The second one is about a new trend among charismatic Christians: to speak in tongues and then ask ChatGPT to "translate" it?! Yes, really. Gives an entirely new meaning to the term "Large Language Model"! Ironically, both presenters sound AI-like so there´s that...
I won´t even tell you what the third video is about. But yeah, chances are that´s just another AI end times deception...
| - Yes, I attained herd immunity in 2025! |
It seems RFK Jr doesn´t have jurisdiction over agriculture, but he seems to be lobbying hard for his somewhat peculiar approach anyway. Well, at least he believes in evolution through natural selection! So does Mother Nature, I´m afraid...
Peculiar fact: none of the articles seem to contain interviews with the chicken farmers. What do *they* say about this situation?
RFK Jr wants bird flue to spread on poultry farms
RFK Jr says let bird flu go through farms
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
Arla (the Scandinavian dairy company) is threatened by a boycott in the UK due to cows getting a mysterious new feed which makes them fart less and hence "produce" less methane, which is a green house gass. The feed is associated with Bill Gates, who is prominently featured in various conspiracy theories... and off we go. Arla, for their part, blame "disinformation".
Personally, I wonder if the people who want to boycott Arla over this think that modern milk is entirely "organic" to begin with? Why do they buy their dairy products from Arla rather than from some semi-illegal biodynamic farm run by Anthroposophists? Duh!
Arla says boycott calls over methane-cutting feed additive based on "misinformation"
"The Leopard Rocks" is a documentary about leopards living in the Aravalli mountains of Rajasthan in northwestern India. I´m not an expert on leopards, but apparently the big cats in this particular region are unusually gregarious. They live in caves in the hills and supposedly never attack the humans in the area.
The documentary tries to paint a picture of primitive shephards living in balance with Nature, but this is obviously a truth with some modification. The area is advanced enough to have a large dam providing water during the dry season, the lack of suitable prey animals for the leopards suggests human impact on the surrounding environment, and when leopards sneak into the villages to abduct and kill farm animals, the local business community pays the poor farmers money in compensation so they won´t hunt the leopards. Why? Because of tourism, that´s why.
The balance around the Leopard Rocks seem very precarious.
Other highlights include Hanuman langurs (yes, they really do live around a temple on one of the rocks), the striped hyena (they, too, are gregarious in this particular region), the mongoose, peacocks, parakeets and antelopes. Frankly, the langurs and the temples were more interesting than the big cats, but that´s me!
End of reflections.
Thomas Sheridan...again! Some interesting speculations about augury in this one. With all due respecc to me man Sheridan, though, some of his predictions during the COVID pandemic didn´t come to pass at all...
En ovanligt korkad artikel. Ja, man äter hund i Kina. Och därför...vad?
Kritiken av Demirok lär oss att vi kan äta hundar
I´ve heard about the red heifers before (cuz of course I have). However, I assumed that the Hamas-heifer connection was a conspiracy theory of the kookier kind. Now, click on the link below. Yes, it´s from CBS News. So I presume Hamas really did mention the red cows from Texas in one of their "official" statements.
Holy moly. Or should I say: holy cow?
On one point, I suspect CBS might be wrong. They don´t mention that Christian fundamentalists have been breeding red heifers in Texas to "aid" the Jewish ditto in their attempts to rebuild the Temple. But surely that´s where the "pet cows" come from?
What these red cows from Texas have to do with war and peace in the Middle East
See also here:
| The closest thing to Shitala´s "Tantric" form I could prompt the prude AI to generate |
“Religion, Devotion and Medicine in North India. The Healing Power of Sitala” is a 2015 book by Fabrizio M Ferrari, a scholar of religion based in the UK. I bought the book on a clearance sale (no academic pricing!), read a few chapters and skimmed the rest. Polemical exchanges between Ferrari and the more mainline scholars he is critiquing could be interesting and, perhaps, entertaining. I noticed that the work is used as a text book in religious studies departments in Sweden.
All across
northern India, people worship a goddess known as Shitala or Sheetala (as I would
render her name given the limitations of my Latin alphabet computer). However,
during his extensive field trips around India, Ferrari noticed something
peculiar. The “scholarly” view of Shitala is that she is a wrathful and terrifying
deity, a “smallpox goddess” who demands worship and punishes those who refuses
with the dreaded disease. Since smallpox is eradicated, presumably she now
attacks people with other infections! However, this is *not* how most people in
India actually see Shitala. Quite the contrary, the Cold Mother is always worshipped
as a benign protectress, principally of women and children, from disease (including
smallpox before 1979) and other kinds of misfortune. In some parts of India,
she isn´t associated with disease-related topics at all, but is rather
worshipped as a fertility goddess. Both poor villagers (whose worship of the deity
can be pretty wild) and the urban gentry look upon Shitala as a mild-mannered
mother goddess, not as a psychotic ghoul spreading deadly illness.
Something´s
clearly up, and this book is the result of Ferrari´s reflections on the Shitala
problematique.
The original
form of Shitala was strikingly “Tantric” and wild. The goddess was depicted as
a white-skinned and “sky-clad” (nude) young woman with big breasts and disheveled
hair (the similarity with a male Shaiva ascetic is striking). She was riding on
an ass (a wild donkey), considered an unclean and borderline evil animal in India.
Later versions of Shitala were more civilized, with the goddess wearing a red
sari and a golden tiara. Ferrari believes that while most deities and spirits
associated with asses/donkeys are indeed inauspicious, Shitala is one of the few
exceptions. Her riding the ass is symbolically a victory *over* evil and inauspiciousness,
not an identification with it. Her other attributes include a pitcher filled
with water (symbolizing her power to “cool” diseases), a broom (to get rid of impurities)
and a winnower (perhaps suggesting an origin among poor peasants).
Beginning
in the 17th century, Bengali poets composed a number of Shitalamangalkavyas,
stories in which Shitala played a decidedly sinister role. Excerpts known as Shitalapalas
were staged in theatrical form and became popular. The “official” view of the
goddess as capricious and brutal comes from these poems and theater plays.
Indeed, Shitala is associated with a number of unsavory characters in these
stories, including blood demons and what not! These stories have been taken at
face value by many Westerners as descriptions of actual religious beliefs, when
they are really literary fiction. Ferrari believe that the Shitalamangalkavyas give
voice to the class prejudices of the privileged poets who wrote them. The point
of these narratives is to describe the village folk and their religion as
stupid and superstitious. It´s a form of very primitive bhakti based on fear:
the peasants worship Shitala only after she has afflicted them with smallpox (which
she then cures). However, even the underprivileged themselves find these tales entertaining,
often due to the inclusion of ghouls, vampires and what not. The author makes a
comparison to modern zombie flicks!
When India
was a British dependency, the colonial power drew all the wrong conclusions from
worship of Shitala during outbreaks of smallpox. This was especially the case
after the British banned variolation in favor of smallpox vaccines. Variolation
(a crude form of smallpox “vaccination”) continued to be carried out despite
the ban. The colonial authorities often blamed outbreaks of smallpox on variolation.
The practice was combined with puja (worship service) to none other than
Shitala. Since the British authorities interpreted Shitala as a dangerous “smallpox
goddess”, they concluded that the Hindus were in thrall to a dangerous
superstition and rejected modern vaccines out of fear of offending her. This
attitude was taken over by the secular health authorities after Indian
independence, and inculcated into foreign doctors and WHO officials who
participated in India´s vaccination campaigns. Scholars also believe in this
negative version, and still today – generations after smallpox have been eradicated
– the Cold Lady is still depicted as a personification of smallpox in learned
literature. Rampant Orientalism?
Maybe. However,
I noticed when reading/skimming this volume that even Ferrari mentions a couple
of examples when Shitala *is* considered dangerous. At village level, she is often
seen as one of “seven sisters”, a collection of goddesses who apparently are
dangerous and capricious unless properly worshipped. He describes a Tantric temple,
in which the auspicious Shitala is surrounded by decidedly wilder deities (and
the inevitable mortuary iconography). Finally, he seems to suggest that the
south Indian, specifically Tamil, goddess Mariyamman is a smallpox goddess for
real, inflicting diseases on people who refuse to pay her homage. Mariyamman is
known in northern India thanks to Tamil migrant workers and is often identified
with…guess who…Shitala. So perhaps there is more to explore here?
An
interesting chapter deal with the folk worship of Shitala. The author visited a
temple where the most popular Shitala festival started with a virtual stampede
during which the crowd jostled for the best places inside the temple grounds. A
long string of goat sacrifices followed (the animals were beheaded) and the
blood offered to the goddess. Hijras played a prominent role during the ritual.
Hijras are self-castrated biologically male transgenders, usually regarded as a
third gender, but considered “male” for the duration of the sacrificial ritual
(only males can offer goats to Shitala). The best and most expensive goat is
usually offered by the local hijra community. During the festival, young women
can be possessed by the goddess, act as if mad, and angrily denounce males
(sometimes including family members or husbands). While many males naturally fear
or dislike such behavior, others are sexually aroused by it (the male onlookers
didn´t realize that Ferrari speaks Bengali and hence understood their lewd
remarks). Worship of Mariyamman is even wilder. It can include piercing rituals,
including piercing of cheeks and tongues with arrows and spears?! Apparently,
these festivals are often sensationalized in the Indian media.
The last
chapter of “Religion, Devotion and Medicine in North India” deal with the gentrification
of Shitala. Usually regarded as a “folk” or “village” goddess, her worship is spreading
upward on the social ladder. This leads to inevitable changes. The middle
class, animal rights activists and Vaishnavas frown on the animal sacrifices
described earlier. Shitala has therefore gotten new looks. She has become more
similar to Lakshmi, rides a dignified white ass that looks almost like a horse,
and is associated with Hanuman (although somewhat contradictorily also with
Bhairava). Another strategy is to make Shitala more similar to Durga, since the
festival of this goddess is popular all over India. In this form, she is no
longer associated with disease at all.
Concluding remark: yes, religions change, our perceptions of the gods and goddesses change, as well, suggesting either that they don´t exist or that their myths and legends can´t be taken as literal truth. But you knew that already. So here I end.