Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts

Monday, October 5, 2026

Viva Las Vegas

 


Alt Right gadfly Vox Day is currently enbroiled in some drama with Erika "Gutsick Gibbon", a science influencer on YouTube who questioned his critique of evolutionary theory. 

Says Vox: "It’s probably best that Ericka runs away now, considering what happened to the last woman who tried to debate me. For those of you who weren’t around then, she literally abandoned the debate after three rounds and ran off to Las Vegas to start a new career as a prostitute at a legal brothel. I’m neither kidding nor exaggerating for effect. You can look it up. You can probably still buy her services, for that matter."

Oookay. The Internet is forever, as they say...

Monday, September 28, 2026

Avbegåvad

 

Credit: msprakash62

Observera att hon inte med ett ord nämner könsdysfori och trans-begreppet. Trots ganska uppenbara kopplingar till just autism. Fortfarande en helig graal för vissa...?

Vad händer om vi skulle skrota NPF-begreppet?

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Progress is uncertain

 


Or at least the expansion of the universe. So maybe *we can´t even know* if the universe is expanding or contracting. Kind of ironic that this comes up in my feed *now*, I mean, dude! 

Monday, September 14, 2026

Schizo-maxxing

 

- So I´m angry! Gotta problem with that, huh huh?

Prompted by a perennial commentator, I asked ChatGPT to comment *my own blog* to see what would happen. This is the first part of the (surprisingly incisive) analysis. Not sure if I even dare to publish part two!

Can you comment / analyze the contents of the blog "Ashtar Command Book Blog"?

Yes. I’ve looked through the blog itself rather than judging it from the title, and it is considerably more interesting—and more internally coherent—than the name initially suggests.

My overall impression is that it is best understood not as a conventional “Ashtar Command” / UFO-spirituality blog, but as a highly eclectic personal intellectual-spiritual notebook whose underlying worldview becomes visible when you look across the years. The blog itself explicitly says that many posts are ironic, that it covers essentially everything, and identifies the author as a “Seeker, Pseudo-Neoplatonist, Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta.”

1. The apparent chaos actually has a recognizable worldview

The subject matter is extraordinarily broad. The current archive jumps between Swedish politics, fringe political movements, evolutionary biology, archaeology, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, paranormal phenomena, philosophy, UFOs, occultism and book reviews. The label system alone has hundreds of categories; among them are Panentheism, Platonism, Process philosophy, Paranormal, Hinduism, Tantrism, Mahayana, Pure Land Buddhism, Ramakrishna, Esotericism, Mysticism and Pseudo-science.

But beneath that apparent randomness I see several recurring questions:

  • Can different religious traditions actually be true simultaneously?
  • Is materialism philosophically adequate?
  • Can mystical experience provide knowledge without simply proving one particular religion?
  • Is there a reality behind the symbols and mythologies of different traditions?
  • How should ancient religious traditions be reconciled with modern science?
  • Can one have genuine metaphysics without retreating into fundamentalism or New Age vagueness?
  • What happens when traditional religion, occultism, science and modern politics collide?

That is a much more definite intellectual project than the blog's deliberately chaotic presentation would suggest.

2. The 2021 religious material is particularly revealing

One of the most important posts I found is the April 28, 2021 piece beginning:

“Kan de verkligen vara sanna allihop?”

The argument is essentially religious pluralism without simple perennialism.

The author considers the possibility that Christian, Hindu and Buddhist religious experiences may all be genuine—even though Christians, Hindus and Buddhists interpret them differently. The post goes further and explicitly entertains being “monotheist, polytheist and pantheist” simultaneously.

That is philosophically interesting because it isn't quite:

“All religions are saying exactly the same thing.”

In fact, the blog seems quite hostile to that simplistic version of perennialism.

Instead, the implicit proposition is closer to:

Reality may be considerably larger than any single symbolic system through which human beings apprehend it.

That distinction is important.

The post invokes upāya—skillful means—to explain why different people might encounter different religious forms. That provides an interesting bridge between Mahayana Buddhism and a more broadly pluralist metaphysics.

3. It is surprisingly anti-New-Age despite being interested in esotericism

This is one of the strongest characteristics of the blog.

Someone seeing labels such as UFOs, paranormal, mysticism, Hinduism, Tantra, kundalini, Bigfoot, Ashtar Command might expect conventional New Age spirituality.

But the blog repeatedly makes fun of exactly that kind of thinking.

For example, it is interested in John Michael Greer's warnings about kundalini and mindfulness, and it examines the dangers of treating spiritual experiences as automatically authoritative.

Likewise, its discussion of David Chapman's heterodox Vajrayana writing is unusually skeptical. It notices that mystical experience does not automatically establish the truth of the religion in which the experiencer interprets it.

So there is an interesting combination:

high openness to metaphysical possibilities + high skepticism about people's claims concerning those possibilities.

That's actually a relatively sophisticated position.

4. The blog is much more “occultist” than “UFO believer”

The title is therefore slightly misleading.

“Ashtar Command” sounds like the central doctrine ought to be extraterrestrial channeling. But the blog's actual interests are much broader.

The profile describes the author as:

“Seeker, Pseudo-Neoplatonist, Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta”

and jokingly says that the author also believes Bigfoot roams the Alaskan Panhandle.

The Pseudo-Neoplatonist designation is particularly revealing.

The metaphysical trajectory seems to be something like:

Neoplatonism → panentheism → religious pluralism → comparative mysticism → Tantra/Shaivism/Shaktism → a multi-level spiritual cosmology.

And that helps explain why seemingly unrelated posts about Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, UFOs, NDEs and paranormal phenomena can coexist on the same site.

They are being treated as different windows onto the same large philosophical problem.

5. The blog's attitude toward Christianity is complicated rather than simply anti-Christian

This is another interesting feature.

There is plenty of criticism of Christianity, Protestantism and biblical literalism. But the criticism is often directed at epistemological exclusivism, rather than Christianity itself.

The 2021 pluralism post, for example, asks why a Christian should automatically regard a Christian mystical experience as genuine while regarding a Hindu or Mormon experience as false.

That is essentially an epistemology of revelation problem.

And the blog appears to retain a substantial interest in Christianity while simultaneously refusing to grant Christianity an automatic monopoly on revelation.

That's quite different from straightforward atheism.

6. There is also a strong anti-materialist thread

The blog isn't simply “spiritual” in the New Age sense. It repeatedly returns to the philosophical inadequacy—or at least incompleteness—of materialism.

For example, the September 2026 posts explicitly criticize “cyber-atheist” free-will denial and discuss consciousness, determinism and free will.

The older free-will discussion is especially interesting because the blog recognizes that determinism does not logically entail materialism. An idealist or spiritual metaphysics could theoretically also be deterministic.

That's a useful philosophical distinction that many popular discussions completely miss.

7. At the same time, it is not anti-science

This may be the blog's most distinctive intellectual tension.

It has an enormous number of science-related posts and labels, including paleontology, evolution, archaeology, zoology, astronomy and psychology.

The position seems approximately:

Science is extremely good at investigating the physical world; that doesn't necessarily settle metaphysics.

That's quite compatible with the pseudo-Neoplatonic/panentheistic direction.

The blog therefore doesn't seem to be trying to replace science with spirituality. It is asking whether scientific naturalism is entitled to become a complete metaphysical worldview merely because science itself is successful.

That's a legitimate philosophical question.

8. The political material is much more difficult

This is where I would recommend considerably more caution.

The blog uses heavy irony, sarcasm, provocation and deliberately inflammatory language. It discusses far-right movements, communists, Trotskyists, MAGA, conspiracy theories, SJWs, fascism, antisemitism, gender politics, etc. Some posts are explicitly jokes or satirical reactions. The blog itself warns that many posts and comments are ironic.

That makes individual posts difficult to classify ideologically.

For example, the September 2026 post about the Brigitte Macron conspiracy explicitly describes the story as a far-right conspiracy theory and points out its antisemitic and homophobic tropes, while also joking that parts of the story seem “strange.”

So one cannot simply say:

“The blog contains far-right material, therefore the blogger endorses the far right.”

Sometimes the subject is being mocked, sometimes analyzed, sometimes quoted, sometimes deliberately baited.

On the other hand, irony is not an excuse to assume that everything is harmless. The reader has to distinguish the author's actual position from deliberately provocative rhetoric.

9. The book-review side is probably the blog's strongest component

There is a remarkable amount of intellectual cross-pollination.

For example, the blog moves from Swedish historical scholarship to David Chapman, John Michael Greer, Buddhism, Theosophy, archaeology, religion and political history. Its reviews frequently use a book as a springboard into a much larger question rather than simply saying whether the book is “good” or “bad.”

That makes the site feel almost like a private commonplace book or intellectual laboratory.

The “book blog” label is therefore actually appropriate, even though the content has expanded far beyond book reviews.


The deeper philosophical position I see

If I had to reconstruct the worldview underlying the blog, I would tentatively formulate it like this:

1. Reality is probably more than physical matter.

2. Consciousness and spiritual experience cannot simply be dismissed as meaningless because they don't fit materialism.

3. Nevertheless, having a mystical experience doesn't automatically prove the interpretation attached to it.

4. Religious traditions may disclose genuine aspects of reality without any one tradition possessing the complete conceptual map.

5. Different religious symbols may therefore have genuine ontological or phenomenological significance without being literally interchangeable.

6. Traditional religions contain both profound metaphysical insights and historically conditioned human material.

7. Science describes the physical level extremely well but does not necessarily exhaust reality.

8. A sufficiently large metaphysics might therefore accommodate Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Platonism and even some paranormal phenomena without simply reducing them to one another.

That is a surprisingly coherent position.

And it is closer to philosophical pluralism + panentheism + Neoplatonism + comparative mysticism than to conventional New Age spirituality.


One particularly interesting development

There also appears to have been an evolution in the blog.

The earlier material I examined—particularly around 2021—has a strong comparative-religion / Buddhist / perennialism-versus-pluralism orientation. By 2026, the blog's self-description explicitly uses “Crypto-Shaiva-Shakta”, and current posts include much more overtly Tantric material.

That suggests the Shaiva-Shakta element isn't merely an isolated interest. It looks like a later development of an older philosophical problem:

If different religious traditions can disclose different aspects of an ultimately larger reality, what sort of metaphysics can accommodate that without reducing everything to “all is one”?

Shaiva-Shakta and Tantric metaphysics offer some unusually powerful tools for answering that question because they can combine transcendence and immanence, multiplicity and unity, personal deity and ultimate reality, manifestation and transcendence.

That may explain why the blog has gradually gravitated in that direction.

My overall assessment

I'd characterize the blog as:

Intellectually eclectic: ★★★★★
Philosophically interesting: ★★★★½
Systematic: ★★½
Historically/religiously curious: ★★★★★
Reliably factual: ★★★½ — individual claims need checking
Irony/sarcasm level: ★★★★★
Conventional New Age: ★
Conventional religious orthodoxy: ★
Underlying metaphysical coherence: ★★★★

The biggest mistake would be to read it literally and chronologically, post by post. The real “content” is the worldview that emerges from the recurring questions across thousands of short pieces.

And I think that worldview is considerably more sophisticated than the deliberately chaotic and sometimes outrageous surface presentation makes it look. 

Thursday, September 10, 2026

Sugar-maxxing (Mellified Man was a fruit cake)

 


Not sure if I like the implications of this, tbh. But it is what it is. Note the speculation that while our brains can´t evolve further, ape brains - at least hypothetically - could still do so. So "Planet of the Apes" is at theoretically possible? The idea that sugar rather than meat made our brains bigger is funny, since it sounds "gay" and "feminist". The sugar would have come from fruit and honey. And fruit could be gathered by females. But sure, Man the Hunter could be replaced by Man the Brave Slasher of Killer-Bees...

The implications I´m talking about is something else. So presumably part of our "junk DNA" came unplugged at some point in ape(ish) evolution, making our brains more complex and hence smarter almost by chance. Oookay. Let´s hope God put that junk in our cells, dude! 

Complete shocker: Free will is...real?!

 


Speaks for itself. Free will denial has always been one of the most silly cyber-atheist talking points, so I suppose it´s a good thing for those guys that we know have objective scientific evidence (as opposed to, you know, mere personal anecdotes) that Voluntarist Free Will really does exist, I mean, duuuude, who knew?!

Sunday, September 6, 2026

String them up

 


Sabine doubles down on the crisis in science / physics. Enjoy! Power move from the mama. I didn´t know string theory is still a thing, btw...

Thursday, September 3, 2026

129 days

 


For a moment I assumed this was going to be a *hard* climate denialist clip, but it seems to be mostly anti-AI. But perhaps that was a joke? Zabine strikes again! 

Oh, and what are the consequences for biological evolution...?

Wednesday, September 2, 2026

Creationism´s Trojan Horse?

 


A recent critique of the so-called Third Way of Evolution (or Third Way). I assumed TWE was a legitimate - albeit controversial - participant in the scientific debates on Neo-Darwinism, but according to the video above, TWE has diplomatic relations with creationists from the Discovery Institute. 

The famed "crisis meeting" at the British Royal Society, which is often mentioned by creationists, was actually called by TWE´s founder Denis Noble himself. In other words, it was simply a TWE-adjacent meeting, not some kind of official scientific conference trying to salvage a evolutionary theory in deep trouble. Some fellows from the Discovery Institute were invited to participate. 

The critics charge that TWE has no scientific standing. That is, their research (if they even do any) isn´t leading anywhere. The more speculative supporters of TWE believe that the individual organism can willingly chose to evolve! There is currently no evidence for this super-Lamarckian take on things.  

Meanwhile, standard evolutionary science has already incorporated other mechanisms besides natural selection working on genetic mutations, for instance epigenetic inheritance, so "narrow Neo-Darwinism" isn´t a thing anymore. This extended synthesis explains things just fine and has lead to huge progress in the medical field (which happens to be Noble´s field).

But note that Sam McKee (the guy on the left in the video) speaks highly of Simon Conway Morris, who is a Christian and believes that evolutionary convergence is an argument for teleology and hence God. Conway Morris recently got a huge grant from the Templeton Foundation. McKee also points to remarkable convergence all across the board in evolution, but never explicitly draws the same conclusion as his collegue. Yet, McKee is a Christian himself. 

Maybe there is more to discover here...

Makabert

 

Credit: JM Ligero Loarte

Källan är en avhoppare, men även den amerikanska militären undersökte ju om djur kunde ha övernaturliga förmågor. Och människor! Så visst kan detta vara sant. Och sanslöst. 

Makabert experiment skulle testa kaniners övernaturliga förmågor

Sunday, August 30, 2026

UFOs on the Moon

 




Sabine Hossenfelder debunks some new (alleged) evidence for UFOs (as in extraterrestrial craft). One piece deals with some Ukrainian scientists who claims to have discovered UFOs on the Moon (!), whereas the second video is about the ubiquitous Avi Loeb. 

Hossenfelder belives the "warp drive" some scientists speculate about are indistinguishable from mundane meteorites. But ahem, what about the strange orbs discussed by Loeb? Interestingly, the US military actually tested some kind of infrared light at the same time, but claims that it *didn´t* cause the orbs. But surely that *is* the most likely explanation? 

What is really going on here, I wonder? And who is psyopping who? 

Thursday, August 20, 2026

Well, akshually, para-dimes are good, akshually

 


A little reminder. A propos the recent blog post on Sabine Hossenfelder and the role of mathematics in the hard (oh-so-hard) sciences.

Quantum questions

Science in default

 


Ufologist Richard Dolan discusses a recent paper analyzing every video released by the Trump admin as part of their "UFO disclosure". Unsurprisingly, the paper reaches the conclusion that the lack of "telemetry data" makes it impossible to know what the UAPs captured on camera really are. For all we know, they could be birds or small drones. It´s not even certain whether stationary objects (which seem to be hovering) are really stationary! And so on.

The refusal of the US government to release the relevant data means that the "disclosure" is very partial...at best. It´s compatible with the conspiracy theory (not discussed in the video) that UFOs are really earthly aircraft, and that the military is intentionally psy-opping the public into believing in extraterrestrials as an excellent cover for its secret projects. Of course, the devious way in which the "disclosure" is made is *also* compatible with the UFOs actually being extraterrestrial, the military trying its best to hide that fact. Maybe that´s the thing: one purpose of the psy-op is to create confusion and conflict among UFO researchers. 

My personal impression is that there is enough data to suggest that something genuinely anomalous is going on. Which doesn´t preclude all kinds of psy-ops and black-ops, of course. Both "ours" and "theirs" (as in Russia and China). Maybe Greenland is sending auk-like drones to mess with the Don´s ballroom blitz? That was a joke, but you do get my point...

There is also the very distinct possibility that neither the US military nor anyone else knows what in heaven´s name (pun intended) is going on. *We* know of course. It´s that "8th tower" going mustang. But hey, don´t tell the CIA!   

Wednesday, August 19, 2026

Inside out

 


Some scientists apparently un-ironically speculate that we may live *inside* a black hole. Well, that would explain a thing or two, I suppose...

Note what Sabine is saying here: there are several competing theories about black holes, each mathematically "correct". Yet, only one of them can be true - or none of them are. So naaah, you can´t just "shut up and do the math", as some midwits are trying to tell us.

Shut up *and do the empirical research* is the bottom line here. Note also that many scientists themselves suspect that the simplest explanation (a black hole is a singularity) simply can´t be true...and so the speculations continue. 

I actually see that as a singularly good thing! 

Crystal clear


Vacuum birefringence something-something. Magnetars turn nothingness into transparent crystal. Schwinger limit. Bizarre stuff. Therefore G-d? Or the interface between purusha and prakriti...

Crystal clear!

Trojans

 


Overheard on the web: "We finally found the solution to the Fermi paradox". Note that the AI is called Evil! Intelligent design, anyone? 

AI creates 16 new viruses from scratch

Thursday, August 13, 2026

Where is the science?

 


It seems both neuroscience and psychology are in crisis. Sabine Hossenfelder has the updates. Shit like this will eventually make the public (including the educated part - they are the only ones paying attention anyway) skeptical towards the entire scientific establishment. And maybe even the project itself? Which I wouldn´t consider a positive development. Note also the crises in quantum physics and cosmology...

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

Therefore Sabine

 


Is causality an emergent property? And what does that even mean? Sabine hopes that quantum physics can be made more logical and less woo-woo-ish, but a recent paper on the topic falls short of this. Or so she believes. Since I´ve been up most of the night, I hardly understand what she´s talking about, but I´m sure it´s interesting...

Monday, August 3, 2026

A universe in a grain of sand


 

Or 9 out of 10 on a bullshit meter? Sabine isn´t *terribly* impressed by the recent headlines about some scientist creating a "mini-universe" in a lab, und so weiter.