Saturday, February 12, 2011

Time to kill yourself

"On the Winter Solstice of 2012 at exactly 11:11 UT a cosmic portal will open in Sedona Arizona and a leap of faith - from the top of Bell Rock - will propel me through its opening.... My two principal beliefs are: 1) that our reality is an intelligently designed cosmic holographic program and 2) that on the Winter Solstice of 2012 at exactly 11:11 UT – a Trans-Dimensional Event (T-DE) will occur.... Most of you will think that I am delusional and that my insane act will certainly result in my death. Death is inevitable - at least nowadays - and 100 years from now it won't matter whether I died in 2012 or 2013 or even 2020. But I believe that some type of cosmic portal will be opening at that time and place and that an opportunity will present itself.... In March 2012 I will reach 70 years of age and nine months later we arrive at the cosmic coordinate. I think it will then be time for me to move on - in one form or another. I'd like to see what else our Cosmic Computer has to offer."
PAG eNews


Humans have a complete lack of probabilistic intuition. One element of this is the inability to realize that out of the set of four digit integers, "1111" is just as likely as any other combination of digits. The odds are the same for 3953 or 0666 or 1234. If you demonstrate a random number generator to the average person and 0000 comes up they'll practically wet themselves. How could such a fantastic and "improbable" coincidence happen? What does it mean?

These 11:11 Wake-Up Calls on your digital clocks, mobile phones, VCR’s and microwaves are the "trademark" prompts of a group of just 1,111 fun-loving Spirit Guardians, or Angels, and the 11:11 prompt is their way of using our innate ability for pattern recognition to let us know that they are here. Once they have your attention, they will use other digits, like 12:34, or 2:22 to remind you of their presence. Invisible to our eyes, they are very real.

1111 Spiritual Guardians

11:11 is almost always meant for and experienced by the 'First Wave' Starborn who are also Warriors for the true righteousness, much as the Knights Templars were in the beginning of their Order; the codes they lived by are embedded in the DNA and are not so much a belief system as it is an instinctive way of responding to circumstances of this world.
December 21/2012 The Official Website

11:11 is a pre-encoded trigger placed into our cellular memory banks prior to our descent into matter which, when activated, signifies that our time of completion is near. This refers to the completion of duality. When the 11:11 appears to you, it is your wake-up call. A direct channel opens up between you and the Invisible. When this happens, it is time to reflect on whatever you are doing for a moment and Look Larger. A transfer is in position. You can enter the Greater Reality if you wish pray or meditate and seed your future and also, you can be seeded by the Invisible. You can ask for help in some specific area of your life or simply listen quietly and receive a revelation.
Global Psychics

What I find REALLY incredible however, is the instances of 11 & 11 11 throughout history, and particularly in relation to particularly important historical events, events which have shaped history.
Here are just a mere fraction of ones I’m aware of:
World War I formally ended at the 11th hour (11AM) of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 – which is why Remembrance Day is 11.11.
The date Berlin wall came down 11.11.89
The last surviving English world war one soldier to have fought in the trenches, Harry Patch, passed away last year as the worlds third oldest man, and the oldest man in Europe. He was 111 years and 38 days. 3+8 = 11.
The date Yasser Arafat died, was 11.11.2004
First telephone call by Alexander G. Bell - 11th March 1876. 1+8+7+6 = 22, which is 11+11
Uri Geller

Another interesting find is that Isaac Newton (who's [sic] ideas kicked off string theory many years later) has 11 letters in his name as well as John Schwarz. Schwarz was one of the two men who worked out the anomalies in the theory. Plus, 1 person + 1 person = 2 people = equality.




Forget that our system of time measurement is a completely arbitrary one. Ignore the fact that the numbers only work out to this "peculiar" sequence because we do math in decimal (base-10). I prefer hexadecimal (base-16) myself. In hex 11-11-11 becomes B-B-B. Songs like Bing Crosby, not Nirvana.

Add Gersten to the list of the chronologically-challenged. Those who think that terra-centric events in our pitiful little solar system are of great cosmological significance, hearkening back to a time when heliocentricism was as certain as death and taxes, and decimal numerology has meaning.

There's a mistake in Gersten's numerology that stands out like a turd in punchbowl. Did you catch it? The actual date/time will be 11-11-2011. Oops. I'd say his chrono-numerology is hopelessly fucked.

For more info on Gersten, including pictures and a video, check out Bad Ufos.


Sedona, Arizona. I know it's been a hot-bed of New Age activity and UFO watching for years but something happened there recently... oh yeah, that's it:
The Angel Valley spiritual center, a place designed to bring harmony into the lives of visitors, was soon visited by homicide detectives not interested in the retreat’s vortex circle, angel connections or Chartres labyrinth. Their questions were about who did what to whom.
New York Times

I guess Gersten will be the next on the list.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Our Wacky World—2/11/2011

Wright says that one of the most interesting parts of the meeting came when he asked Davis about L. Ron Hubbard's medical records. Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, had maintained that he was blind and a 'hopeless cripple' at the end of World War II — and that he had healed himself through measures that later became the basis of Dianetics, the 1950 book that became the basis for Scientology.
"I had found evidence that Hubbard was never actually injured during the war. ... And so we pressed [Tommy Davis] for evidence that there had been such injuries and [Hubbard] had been the war hero that he described," says Wright. 
NPR


It would seem that Hubbard's military record is not particularly glorious:
There are a series of documents from April and June of 1941 of how Hubbard lined up a job for himself. Two qualifications he did not have to make up were that he was white and male. The others took some imagination.
It gets wackier…


A new Thai airline is recruiting transexual flight attendants



Cult movie buffs are raising money for a RoboCop statue in Detroit


Moreover, police surveillance of Rodriguez and the wiretap that intercepted the 10,000 phone calls yielded nothing about the killing -- even though police tried to stimulate incriminating phone conversations. Among their techniques was to leave fake blackmail notes for Rodriguez, claiming that the writer had information that Rodriguez was guilty and demanding money not to go to police.
Mercury News


Here's the latest thing for you to worry about—terrorists in submarines:

The Register


A fake spokesman for Sony tweeted the PlayStation 3 jailbreak code all over the interwebs—after Sony got a court injunction to prevent hackers from posting the code on-line



In Xbox news, it may not be a good idea to let your son use your credit card for Xbox Live




An Italian motorist has been caught (almost) exceeding the sound barrier


As they venture into the free market for health insurance, these lawmakers — many of whom swept into office fueled by tea party anger over the health care law — are facing monthly premiums of $1,200 and fears of double-digit rate hikes. The experience has caused some of them to think harder about the “replace” part of the “repeal and replace” mantra the GOP has adopted regarding the health care law.


Another Republican family man caught with his pants (almost) down—on Craigslist

Gawker

It took him all of three hours to resign.


Evangelical Manifest Destiny

Very small penis
One of the great things about God's Bullies™ is that just when you think they've reached the bottom of the stupid barrel they pull another boner out of the proverbial hat. Check out the American Family Associaton's Bryan "Douche" Fischer's take on those heathen injuns:
International legal scholars have always recognized that sovereign control of land is legitimately transferred in at least three ways: settlement, purchase, and conquest. Europeans have to this day a legitimate claim on American soil for all three of those reasons...
Ah yes, Eminent Domain with extreme prejudice works so well it just has to be legit. My eyes have been opened to the White way of revising history. I'd like share more of this revelation with you but strangely, the original post has been scrubbed from the site.

There's always Google Cache, which unfortunately is now long gone, but some kind soul posted a pdf of it here. He goes on to opine:
Is this to say the same holds true for native American tribes today? In many respects, the answer is of course no. But in some senses, the answer is yes. Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.
Obviously it has nothing to do with infected blankets, massacres, and the United States Government's record of breaking every single treaty reached with Native Americans. It has nothing to do with their being forcibly resettled in god-awful places and having most of their "heathen culture" squeezed out of them. The past deeds of the inherently superior White Man have absolutely nothing to do with the pathetic state of despair that has been achieved. It's not even Satan's fault—it's their own.
Sadly, this column will likely generate a firestorm of nuclear proportions among wingers on the left rather than the thoughtful reflection the thesis deserves.
The first half of that sentence is the only thing this retarded Wanker for Jesus has gotten right. As for the second, I'd venture that he has a very small penis.


BTW, Fischer has gone off about this topic before:
In other words, President Obama wants to give the entire land mass of the United States of America back to the Indians. He wants Indian tribes to be our new overlords.
"God knows" white folks like Fischer wouldn't want to stop being the old overlords.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Our Wacky World—2/8/2011


Another Stupor Bowl come and gone. Unfortunately for the NFL it doesn't come off without a hitch. Thanks to incompetent management the stadium was short over a thousand seats.

There there was this:
For absurdity, how about those four Navy F-18s flying over the stadium - with its retractable roof closed? Everybody inside could only see the planes on the stadium's video screens. It was strictly a two-second beauty shot. Know what it cost taxpayers? I'll tell you: $450,000. (The Navy justifies the expense by saying it's good for recruiting.)
Washington Post

Finally, Will.I.am of The Black Eyed Peas said he was unable to fulfill his promise of tweeting during his band's Super Bowl halftime performance because his cell phone AT&T had no service. Sounds like a black eye for AT&T.

On a related topic, the evidence for brain-damaged football players continues to accumulate. The problem with American football is that the padding and helmets make it possible to hit with much more force, greatly increasing the risk of injury. Players are not as invincible as they think they are.


"The nursing student says she knew eating soap was dangerous, but ignored the warning labels on the box in favour of licking the deadly powder daily, from the minute she woke up in the morning. Soon she had moved onto licking the bubbles of soap in the shower, too, a habit that was getting her through up to five bars of soap a week."


"A psychotherapist told a court an eight-year-old boy mentally communicated feelings of fear through his bad behaviour, leading her to believe he had been abused" (more repressed memory bullshit with telepathy as bonus woo)

News Scotsman

"Where do mice come from? How do they get in your home? Since mice have no bones they can squeeze through cracks as small as one fourth in diameter. Cracks can be found in the wall, doors, cupboards whatever. If you see any holes or cracks in your home make sure you seal them. This prevents them from coming in."
Romow Home Garden Blog


A Tampa Bay contractor charged an elderly homeowner $107,000 for a $10 seawall patch job—and that wasn't all...

WTSP


"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

The Telegraph


The Virginia General Assembly has decided not to legalize carrying concealed machine guns

Pilot Online



George W. Bush will NOT be visiting Switzerland due to a slight legal problem

Reuters


Canadian cop pleads guilty to threatening arrestees with electro-torture

CTV News


A pregnant woman was accidentally given an "abortion pill"

WPVI


Some idiot on Reddit decided that a college student's cancer fundraiser was bogus and unleashed an on-line lynch mob. The only problem is that she's legit.

Gawker

Monday, February 7, 2011

Ronald Reagan, unelectable RINO

Well, Ronald Reagan, Esq. would have been 100 this week if he hadn't died from Alzheimers already. You're probably thinking "everyone else is blogging about it so why bother?" Fuck it, I'm going to post something anyway.

If you haven't already noticed the inevitable whitewash of Reagan's "legacy" then you're in for a surprise—it's been underway for years. Conveniently, it's all been summed up for me—I'll just pass it along:

On Sunday, Americans will mark the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan. But for the conservative movement, the now-decades long hagiography project is reaching a crescendo. While the Gipper's former speechwriter Peggy Noonan today lauded his goodness in the Wall Street Journal Friday, Sarah Palin will kick-off the Young Americans for Freedom three day extravaganza at the Reagan Library in California.
But while this weekend's anniversary will rightly celebrate Ronald Reagan's Cold War resolve, boundless optimism, and deep, abiding faith in the American people, the true legacy of President Reagan will nowhere be on display. The father of the Republican Party's fiscal irresponsibility, Ronald Reagan made skyrocketing national debt, a dangerously reflexive aversion to taxes and a corrosive distrust of the people's government a permanent fixture of American politics.
Perspectives

This weekend, Republicans marked the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan with speeches celebrating his small government philosophy, anti-tax fervor and hard-line foreign policy. But if Reagan was a GOP candidate today, he would doubtless fall victim to violations of his own 11th Commandment, "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican." Because despite all of the right-wing hagiography, Ronald Reagan ballooned the national debt, repeatedly raised taxes, signed abortion rights legislation and negotiated with terrorists in Iran. For those and so many other perceived offenses, the GOP rank and file - and especially its purity-demanding Tea Partiers - would today brand a reanimated Ronald Reagan a Republican in Name Only.
Yes, good old saint Ronnie. What a model Republican. He'd still be electable today if only he hadn't...
  1. Tripled the national debt
  2. Raised taxes 11 times
  3. Expanded the size of government
  4. Supported the "socialist" Earned Income Tax Credit
  5. Negotiated with terrorists in Tehran
  6. Sought to eliminate nuclear weapons
  7. Given amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants
  8. Approved protectionist trade barriers
  9. Signed an abortion rights law in California
  10. Eventually debunked AIDS myths Republicans continued to perpetuate
Perspectives


"You glance out the window and the people are walking around Pennsylvania Avenue and you say, 'I could never say I am going to run down to the drugstore and get some magazines.' I can't do that anymore." -- President Reagan, 8/11/82, to Time's Hugh Sidey that he sometimes feels trapped in the White House.

"Sometimes I look out there at Pennsylvania Avenue and see people bustling along, and it suddenly dawns on me that probably never again can I just say 'Hey, I'm going down to the drugstore to look at the magazines,'" -- President Reagan, 12/09/82, discussing his feelings of confinement with a People reporter.

"Sometimes I look out the window at Pennsylvania Avenue and wonder what it would be like to be able to just walk down the street to the corner drugstore and look at the magazines. I can't do that anymore." - President Reagan, 12/16/82, conveying one of his regrets to The Washington Post.

"You find yourself remembering what it was like when on the spur of the moment you could just yell to your wife that you were going down to the drugstore and get a magazine. You can't do that anymore." -- President Reagan, 1/27/84, telling Time magazine about being President.


After Reagan I thought things could never get "that bad" again. Well...

Sunday, February 6, 2011

RatCave Book Club—2/6/2011

Last updated 2011.08.24

Superbowl Sunday. It's rather cold for a tailgate party this year. While everyone else is anticipating $6 million per minute TV commercials, I'm sitting here writing installment four of the Book Club...


Death From The Skies!: The Science Behind the End of the World by Phil Plait, Ph.D., 2008
Astronomer Phil Plait is the former president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, a popular blog author and host of the Discovery Channel series Bad Universe.

From asteroid impacts to gamma ray bursts to the death of the sun, our universe is inevitably going to wipe us out. Plait gives us an exciting laundry list of all the ways it can happen. Fortunately, it probably won't be anytime soon.


LSD: My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann, Ph.D., 1979. English translation by Jonathan Ott, 1983

The book can be read here and here.

In 1943, in the midst of WWII in neutral Switzerland, Sandoz chemist Albert Hoffmann was working on a re-synthesis of a molecule he had first synthesized five years earlier, his twenty-fifth derivative of lysergic acid, lysergic acid diethylamide, referred to in the lab as LSD-25...


Last Friday, April 16,1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.
Hoffmann had just experienced the first LSD trip.
...how had I managed to absorb this material? Because of the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of the substance was absorbed through the skin. If LSD-25 had indeed been the cause of this bizarre experience, then it must be a substance of extraordinary potency. There seemed to be only one way of getting to the bottom of this. I decided on a self-experiment.
Exercising extreme caution, I began the planned series of experiments with the smallest quantity that could be expected to produce some effect, considering the activity of the ergot alkaloids known at the time: namely, 0.25 mg (mg = milligram = one thousandth of a gram) of lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. Quoted below is the entry for this experiment in my laboratory journal of April 19, 1943. 
✂...
By the time the doctor arrived, the climax of my despondent condition had already passed. My laboratory assistant informed him about my self-experiment, as I myself was not yet able to formulate a coherent sentence. He shook his head in perplexity, after my attempts to describe the mortal danger that threatened my body. He could detect no abnormal symptoms other than extremely dilated pupils. Pulse, blood pressure, breathing were all normal. He saw no reason to prescribe any medication. Instead he conveyed me to my bed and stood watch over me. Slowly I came back from a weird, unfamiliar world to reassuring everyday reality. The horror softened and gave way to a feeling of good fortune and gratitude, the more normal perceptions and thoughts returned, and I became more confident that the danger of insanity was conclusively past.
The book continues with Hoffman's isolation of Psilocybin and Psilocin, and his life-long journey through the world of psychedelic experiences. He avoids the excesses of gurus like Timothy Leary while maintaining a positive outlook on the benefits of the controlled use of psychedelics. He died on April 29, 2008 at the age of 102.

For the record, I'm not experienced. I have enough problems.


The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, 2008
The topic of this book is not a new one; the human mind has no intuitive understanding of probability. Mlodinow does a marvelous job of demolishing many myths and misconceptions using probabilistic methodology (see graph). This is the best overview of the basis of probability and statistics that I've read so far.

Mlodinow covers a lot of ground. The misuse and misunderstand of statistics by gamblers, investors and prosecutors. The dangers of false positives and the lack of weighting in HIV testing. Why Bruce Willis and Bill Gates ended up rich and famous and you didn't. By the time he was finished Mlodinow had me understanding more clearly than ever before the relationship between the Fibonacci sequence and the bell curve. This book is an excellent treatise on an important and dangerously misunderstood field of knowledge that directly affects everyday life.

Here's a lecture by Mlodinow.

While I'm on the topic, here's an old trick you can use to con investors out of their money. You start an expensive investment advice newsletter. You sign up 1024 investors. You pick a relatively safe, stable investment and tell half your subscribers that it will rise in the next month and the other half that it will fall. After repeating this for six months you will have been, by sheer random chance, correct every time for approximately sixteen of your subscribers (for another sixteen of your subscribers you will have been wrong every single time). Those sixteen-odd people will be absolutely convinced that you are an investment genius and will pay you large sums of money for further advice. They're hooked. You can keep them going for a long time to come. Every time you're wrong you shrug it off by saying, "I have to be wrong sometime". You make money by doing absolutely nothing.

There's a list of all my books reviews here.