*Did* Epstein kill himself?

 

Hmmm...

Ballroom blitz

 

Was the recent Trump assassination attempt staged by the Trump administration? Was it even an assassination attempt in the first place? I don´t think Scott Carney´s speculations makes much sense, tbh. 

Is the suspected gun man Cole Tomas Allen really a pro-Trump plant? And since his actions are clearly irrational, why couldn´t he had tried to kill the president? Or is the idea that the FBI knew what he was planning, but decided to let him inside the building anyway? OK, fine, but where´s the - you know - evidence?  

Note also that the high-quality footage shows that the suspect *did* have a long gun...

How "science" works

 

Credit: Jud McCranie

Hear, hear! 

Graduate school was a scam

Metaphorically

 

Not sure why Scott Carney (the first clip above) is so happy about Nick Fuentes calling on his supporters to boycott the midterms. Fuentes is a marginal character and hasn´t been MAGA (sensu stricto) for years. He tried to influence the 2024 presidential elections with a similar boycott call, and it didn´t work out (obviously). So a few Nazi wannabes won´t vote GOP in 2026 or 2028, who cares?

The second clip (from TYT) discusses the Steven Bannon situation. I find it amazing that Bannon *still* has some traction on the far right after all the revelations in the Epstein Files.

Maybe Fuentes the Groyper Führer has a certain point, after all. Time to burn it all down. Or at least walk away now and avoid the rush!  

The real fate of the Waterloo fallen

 

So I´ve read "The real fate of the Waterloo fallen" (2023) by Bernard Wilkin, Robin Schäfer and Tony Pollard. This is some really, really sick shit. But then, people 200 years ago lived like dogs. And died like dogs. And if you died with your boots on, chances are somebody stole the boots...and then turned your dead body into fertilizer! For a profit, obviously.

During the decades after the Napoleonic Wars, bones from both dead soldiers and horses were stolen from mass graves all over Europe and shipped to Britain, where they were turned into fertilizer for the expanding agricultural industry. I´m not even sure if "stolen" is the right word, since almost everyone must have been in on it. And the quantities involved were enormous: we´re talking ship loads here. 

Wilkin, Schäfer and Pollard believed that an even more exotic fate befell the dead at Waterloo. Archeological excavations around the town have so far not been able to find the mass graves which simply *must* have been there, and which were documented even by British painters visiting the site just a few years after the famed battle of 1815. So what happened to the dead bodies? The authors believe that the bones were dug up and turned into bone char, which is used to decolorize brown sugar and turn it white.

Yes, you read that right. The fate of the Waterloo fallen was to end up in the Belgian sugar refining industry. The number of dead at Waterloo isn´t precisely known, but the authors use a low range estimate of 10,000. Add to that perhaps 10,000 dead horses and you have a considerable resource just waiting to be exploited. 

Many of the people digging for human bones at recent  battlefields were poor. In Belgium, the presumably low-income farmhands worked for local farmers in the Waterloo area. I assume the bone merchants or sugar refinery owners were of the more affluent classes. 

Of course, things like this are still going on. See Scott Carney´s book "The Red Market" for more details about the Indian trade in human bones stolen from cemeteries, the Chinese trade in organs for transplants coercively taken from unwilling donors in prison, trafficking of children for adoption all over the so-called Third World, and so on. Just don´t say I didn´t warn you!    

The real fate of the Waterloo fallen

Trade off

 

Scott Carney believes that Trump traded Ukraine and Taiwan for Venezuela (a Russian and Chinese ally). There might absolutely be something to this speculation. The real question is whether Trump can pull it off. First, his administration seems split backstage between "isolationists" (or rather Western Hemisphere hegemonists) and a kind of retro-Neo-Cons with global ambitions. Second, Trump hasn´t actually occupied Venezuela with boots on the ground, so how is he supposed to run it or take its oil, if the current government simply decides to stay in power?

As matters stand now, geopolitical chaos is a more likely outcome than a neat division of the world between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. 

Bellwether counties

 

???!!! Scott Carney believes that the Trump campaign stole the 2024 POTUS elections by manipulating the computer software. Some of the counties reporting election results *don´t even exist*. Yes: phantom counties?! 

Of course, Trump supporters believe that the large number of (very real) "bellwether counties" switching to Biden in 2020 proves *those* elections were rigged. 

Still, fake counties is surely a new one! 

Shangri-La

 

Scott Carney strikes again. The video is about the "Gelephu Mindfulness City", some kind of bizarre utopian scheme in Bhutan (of all places). Or a very desperate attempt to attract foreign investment into the small Himalayan kingdom? 

The "city" has all the right New Age vibes. It´s supposed to be sustainable, spiritual, unite modern and ancient medicine, and is projected to have a hydroelectric power plant designed to look like some kind of Buddhist symbol?! And yes, it seems only foreigners are supposed to live there.

Hmmm...methinks the king of Bhutan may have overestimated the economic prowess of the new agey California middle classes. The whole thing looks like a weird parody of the Western Idea of Progress. So unless India (still in a state of growth, apparently) thinks they can harness all that electric power, I´d say the mindfulness Shangri-La will fail...  

The mad ones

 

Our man Scott Carney tries to understand "the mad ones", specifically Drukpa Kunley, an antinomian teacher in 16th century Bhutan. Was he the original "guru grifter" or some kind of legit rebel against the religious establishment of his day? 

I suppose the answer is that he was a bit of both. Most rebels probably are fools and grifters who never accomplish anything, even though the system they react against may be pass its pull date. 

Blessed are those who liveth at a time when real societal change is possible!  

Into the vortex

 

Some scary stuff from Scott Carney. His main point is that Ukraine wouldn´t have been invaded if they had kept their nuclear weapons. Without them, "security guarantees" are worthless. Even when given by the United States (note Carney´s pique to Marco Rubio). So the obvious conclusion is for every small nation in a geopolitically volatile region to get their own nuclear weapons. 

Carney references a study arguing that even a "limited" nuclear war between India and Pakistan, involving hundreds of warheads, would affect the climate *all over the world*, trigger famine conditions, and so on. 

I´m not entirely sure what the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War has to do with this, however, since the potential nuclear standoff was between the United States and the Soviet Union, not regional powers. (Carney has written an entire book, "The Vortex", about this situation.) 

Still, a very...ahem...interesting video.   

Cheetah House

 

I´ve linked to this content before, but here we go again. Investigative reporter and cult-buster Scott Carney interviews Willoughby Britton, who I assume is the founder of Cheetah House, an organization devoted to aid victims of destructive meditation practices. 

Summary of the basic points:

Meditation teachers often know about adverse side effects of meditation, but prefer not to talk about them for commercial reasons. One of the few exceptions is Sam Harris, who even discussed the issue with Britton on his podcast! Adverse effects may include insomnia, an inability to carry out daily chores (such as driving), hallucinations, intense fear, and so on. Britton tells a story about two prominent meditators who went literally psychotic. 50% of all Americans have tested meditation, and of these, 10% report strong adverse effects. That´s a lot of people!

"Kundalini" is a wastebasket category which includes everything seemingly inexplicable which is also "spiritual". Groups that are really religious often promote their techniques (including those awakening kundalini) as "secular", and only reveal the religious interpretation of various phenomena after they´ve been experienced by the meditator (who may then feel betrayed).

Experiences are always interpreted. There is nothing in the experience itself which automatically establish it as "spiritual" as opposed to, say, a hallucination. This is a very important point! Also, nothing in the experience itself points to any particular ethic. Once again, ethical consequences (such as more compassion) are superimposed on the experiences "from the outside" and are hence also interpretations. 

Britton says, somewhat sarcastically, that the number of boddhisattvas in the world seems to be vanishingly small given the fact that so many people are practicing meditation. Many American Buddhists send her hate mail due to her criticism of meditation. She doesn´t think Buddhists are in general more compassionate than anyone else. Britton even implies that she bought a cabin in a remote part of Vermont to which she can flee if the threats against her go overboard?! Carney recounts a gruesome story of how one of his students killed herself during a visit to India, her diary indicating that she believed herself to be a boddhisattva after intense meditation practices. 

Psychedelic drugs have the same problems as meditation, but "on steroids". However, literally nobody claims there are *no* potential side effects of such drugs, while this is still common among meditators. Ketamine has become a popular drug. Carney retells a story about how the Buddha himself changed his meditation practices after some of his monks had killed themselves! The story is supposedly found in the Pali Canon. 

Good luck with this one-and-a-half-hour long conversation.    

     

The aesthetics of evolution

 

The Atheist Party Line crowd will "counter"-attack in 10, 9, 8, 7...

I never read "The Wedge" (as in Scott Carney´s book with that title), but I suppose this 15-minute video is a kind of teaser trailer. The title is "What the Theory of Evolution Gets Wrong" and it´s posted on a channel jokingly called "backchannel"...

Short story: Consciousness plays a greater and more independent role in evolution than we usually assume. Maybe even love and aesthetics! Yes, it´s the peacock again...

Scott Carney is the man

 

Note how my man Scott Carney goes from a materialist argument to a form of panpsychism or pantheism. 

But...

According to Carney, Alan Watts said "you are the universe becoming conscious of itself". But surely Watts had it exactly backwards? "You" are the universe *losing* its consciousness of itself as the universe.

You´re not the most imporant part of the whole. You´re its least important part. The Moon eats people.   

Feel free

 

Scott Carney does some digging into the largely unregulated American nutritional supplement industry and finds...exactly what you might expect. And yes, our old friend kratom is part of the picture. Again!  

Anatomy riots

 

I was tempted to call this blog post "This is the world atheists want" or some even less kind title. Scott Carney is an investigative reporter most known for his rocky relationship with Wim Hof and his successors. He has been involved in other projects, too, however. 

When blogging about the Aghori (the bizarre Tantric sect in Varanasi, India), one question always haunted me: where on earth do these guys get hold of human skulls, ribs and other mortuary paraphernalia? Their contacts with the untouchable caste which cremate dead bodies gave part of the answer. But surely you can´t just walk into a shop in India and buy fresh craniums?

Well, actually...you can. 

I never read Carney´s book on this and related topics, "The Red Market". The YouTube clip above would therefore have to do for now. It features Carney interviewing an Indian-American scholar on this rather morbid topic. It turns out that there is an *enormous* international trade in human body parts, teeth and skeletal remains (or whole skeletons). Some of it is legal, much else less so. Carney has lived in India, which presumably explains his concentration on that particular nation. Of course, India´s enormous population and the fact that poverty is still relatively widespread makes it a "natural" provider for a market in dead people. There is never a shortage of corpses. 

Carney does mention the Aghori, and also tells a story of smugglers at the Indian-Bhutanese border, who were providing Tibetan Buddhists in Bhutan with literal truck-loads of skulls and tibia, used in Tantric rituals. But the main culprit in this story is not religion, but science. Centuries ago, medical schools in the Western world were employing grave-diggers to obtain fresh corpses for dissection and study. "Anatomy riots" followed, as ordinary people attacked and burned down the medical schools. Oh, those superstitious plebs, with no understanding of scientific progress! I´m being ironic. Don´t show this to the local Skeptic club (TM)!  

When Britain turned India into a colony, the market in corpses and skeletons expanded considerably. Indian corpses, to be exact. The periodic famines (which Carney and his Indian guest believes were caused by the British) were good for business. After independence, this Indian market *became even larger*?!

In India, a corpse must apparently be claimed within 48 hours. That leaves a lot of unclaimed corpses, and that creates business opportunities. Medical schools in both India and the United States still use real human body parts, hopefully obtained through informed consent procedures, but very often, probably not really. Carney did walk into a certain store in Calcutta and procured a skeleton of a 50-year old woman within minutes. He also learned that if you bribe a low-caste cremetion worker with 25 dollars, he will readily obtain a nice human cranium within a day or so. The store acts as middle-man. 

"The Red Market" must have created quite a splash in India, since the Indian authorities did change the law on one point: foreign tourists are no longer allowed to leave the country with human body parts in their possession. There is even a huge sign to this effect at the international airport in New Delhi! 

Well, always good to hear...

But what about the Aghori? Apparently, the sect often performs for tourists, so in that sense, morbid Western interest in seeing the sadhus "touch" skeletal remains fuels the local demand for precisely such remains. In the same ways, Western interest in shrunken heads makes tribals in other parts of the world go on head-hunts. However, I think it´s rather obvious that the evil White Man isn´t the only culprit here. 

It´s almost as if the Aghori are right: the entire world is a gigantic charnel ground, at which Kali is dancing...      

Tectonic cult

 

Not exactly reassuring, to put it mildly. In 1993, a minor earthquake (complete with strange lights in the sky) rocked a remote area of the Australian outback. The official explanation has always been that it was a meteorite impact. There is just one problem: the epicenter of the quake was at a piece of land owned by Aum Shinrikyo. Yes, the Japanese doomsday cult, which two years later would attack the Tokyo subway, literally owned the property hit by the "meteorite". In an infinite universe, given infinite possibilities, this could, of course, happen purely by chance. Unless the cult had detonated a nuclear weapon...

In the YouTube clip above, American journalist Scott Carney speculates that this may just have been the case. Aum Shinrikyo did use its Australian property to produce sarin, the nerve gas used in the 1995 attacks in Japan. They also mined uranium! As for nuclear weapons triggering earthquakes, this is known as "tectonic weapons", and while they supposedly don´t exist, both superpowers tried to develop them during the Cold War. Or at least looked into the possibility.

If there ever was a cult willing - and perhaps even ready - to use a literal doomsday weapon, it was Aum Shinrikyo...     

Context is everything

 

Note how Scott Carney seamlessly transitions from a materialist denial of a unified self or soul, to a de facto form of pantheism. Which could pass for Buddhism in the United States. 

Yes, it´s the same Carney who is currently feuding with Enahm Hof, Wim Hof´s son (or so my man Carney claims)...

Probably don´t have time to check him out further, but feel free to do so yourselves!