The Nuttiness Of Religious Folk...

Okay, okay, so, one shouldn't generalize, but I must confess that one of the things which doesn't cease to amaze me is the weirdness of the train of though of people who "have faith".

I mean, they find the ability to turn everything upside down and reverse the logic used to prove them wrong as a weapon to prove they're right.  And all this with a poker face and a self-righteousness that defies all factual evidence.

The thing is that organized religion has made such a messy blur of the facts that their obviously blind flock use skewed theories and falsified texts as a shield to everything which is said to make them see the light.

For instance, when people with faith cite the bible, I always ask "which one?  The falsification that is the King James bible or the original Hebrew texts?"
When I go on that, for example, the part where god created Man and Woman as Adam and not Eve but Lilith (made from the dust, like Adam); where Lilith ran off because she didn't want to obey hubbie Adam and as a consequence god created Eve, was left out of the translation, along with the part where god the all-seeing and all-knowing had to organize a posse of Arch-Angels to go and look for Lilith in order to try and persuade her to come back to the Garden Of Eden.

These parts obviously didn't fit the general ideas this newly founded Roman Catholic church had about the story they wanted to sell to the people, so, they were omitted.  The reaction by the faithful to these facts is a whole lot of gibberish someone with but an ounce of rationale would dismiss as laughable or at least fabrications by a bunch of leaders who's intent clearly is to spew so much mist their followers don't know left from right anymore.

Major problem is that this gibberish and non-sense is held for the truth and nothing but the truth by these fidels and is used against anybody who dares to attack their belief.

No wonder the world is going down the drain...

JJ

0bserving, the suspicious way...

Came across a YouTube channel the other day which has the most amazing daily reviews about he sun's activities and its influences on our Earth, along with some of the most accurate weather- and seismic activity forecasts you'll find around the net.

The website is Suspicious0bservers and the YouTube channel can be found here.

Latest post is this one:

But this is a daily event, so watch for new updates every 24 hours.

The Mobile Observatory Project, ObservatoryProject.com, and Suspicious0bservers.org are creations of KAHB LLC, a company created and owned by Ben Davidson, so kudos and enormous thanks to Ben for his efforts...

JJ

Triple A Standard for the USA? Kidding, right?

Rating bureau Fitch just announced and confirmed the "triple A" rating for the USA because (quote) "The United States currently benefit from an exceptional financial flexibility (...) and are in possession of the most liquid capital market in the world"

According to Fitch in the same communiqué, a few things mean that the USA can carry a higher burden of national debt than most other countries which have a tripple A rating.

Fitch goes on to emphasize that "The American economy is one of the most productive and dynamic and has a technology which is the most advanced in the world".  Fitch also stated it will not change this tripple A status in the course of the coming months...

Oh boy...

Remember folks that Fitch was one of those Rating Bureaus that gave the Lehman Brothers bank an AAA rating as late as the night before they went bankrupt!

And financial flexibility?  Sure.  But not because the American economy is doing great.  In fact, the economy is doing very, very bad.  This financial flexibility comes from the fact that the Federal Reserve has been printing money like mad to keep up with the losses and stabilize the market.

Another big mistake which seems to be a sign of the (financial) times, is that nowadays, so-called "experts" look at the stock market to tell how an economy is doing.  Wrong!

The stock market only indicates how good, well, the stock market is doing.

Stock markets are completely artificial because the rise or fall or even the worth of stock is being steered by rumours and/or speculation.

For instance and as an example, why are we paying a hole in our pocket for car fuel?  Because unrest in the Middle East could lead to shortage.  Shortage would mean higher prices for a barrel of crude and thus less profit on the British/American oil market in London.   Shortage would also make the economy go down.

Now, the funny thing is that because of this speculated "could be" scenario, the brokers panic and this panic makes the price of oil on the market go up anyway.

But, because there's no shortage, the economy doesn't suffer.  Nope.  It just makes you and me cough up a lot more cash when filling the reservoir of our means of transport.

The only people wo stand to benefit are the ones doing the trading.  Not the OPEC (Oil Producing & Exporting Countries) because the base price which the oil market pays to the Arabs and Venezuela doesn't go up.  Only the sales price on the market once the oil has been purchased by that market.

In other words, because of this fear that something might go wrong in the Middle East and that there is a possibility that there would be a shortage, the prices are artificially blown out of proportion, with huge profits for those who own the oil industries.

Now, of course, the thing to do is to make sure that the threat of a conflict in the Middle East never goes away, so that the prices stay artificially high, and you're set for life.

But to come back to Fitch and its ludicrous rating of the US economy: the US are bankrupt.  Even more so than Greece ever was.  The US deficit has so many zeros at the end I don't even know anymore what its called like.  Trillion? Zillion?

A survey done in 2007 brought to the light that of all the Dollars in circulation in the USA, exactly 3% was paper money.  Three percent.  All the rest was electronic money which only exists in the books of the banks.

And the situation hasn't bettered since, just because the economy is going down the drain as well, thanks to more technical and skilled jobs being outsourced to Europe, China and a handful of other countries around the world.

The only thing which keeps America afloat is the aformentioned fact that the Federal Reserve -which is a private bank, by the way- keeps printing money like there's no tomorrow (which there probably isn't anyway); and because the US Dollar is still being used as world trading currency.

Because of the latter, all non-US banks keep buying Dollars by the truckload, since they're using it for trading on the markets anyway.  This allows the Dollar to not fall but on the contrary keep a stable value...

But in the end it's just a smokescreen.  The financial pit the US has dug for itself is meanwhile so big that no amount of printing extra cash can stop the downfall.

No rating bureau can stop that either, despite bogus triple A announcements...


JJ

Religion In Ancient Cultures

First of all -and to make things clear- I DO NOT oppose religion, although I myself am absolutely not religious.
What I DO oppose is ORGANIZED religion.

If someone on a blue monday decides to follow this or that religion, hey, who am I to be against that.  If, on the other hand, you have someone who stands up and claim they are the keepers of the truth and that they're going to show you in what to believe -and in what not- how to believe and when to believe, then something's not right.

If on top of that, those "keepers of the truth" are known to have altered quite a lot of stories -including, YES!, the bible- to fit their own agenda and that they have knowingly tried to disguise wrongdoings on a global scale, then you unequivocaly know that you're dealing with charlatans who's only goal it is, and always has been, to stay in power, to have power over the people, over "their flock".

As a consequence, 90% of the people who claim that they are religious, are in fact not religious at all.  They are followers of the dogmas and doctrines of a CHURCH, dogmas and doctrines written by men whose sole purpose it was to get a grasp on the common people.  Don't forget that the RC church was started around AD325 out of POLITICAL reasons, namely to try and keep a crumbling Roman Empire together without the use of military force...

But let's get back to the purpose of this epistle, namely the shedding of some personal light on religion in Ancient Times.

As a matter of fact, I think that the term "religion" is totally unfitting for a lot of things ancient civilizations did.  With ancient civilizations, I mean the pre-dynasty Egyptians, the Azteks, Mayas, Incas, Olmeks, Tolteks, Sumer and other nations.

First of all you have to know that those civilizations had many gods.  Mostly they had a god for almost any variety of known activity.  Why would that be?  Could it be that these "gods" were originally "masters" in some or other craft; a craft that they passed on to lesser instructed civilizations?

I'm not claiming that these gods were extra-terrestrials.  Although this is of course a possibility, seeing how ancient tales from different civilizations all have these "beings" descending from the sky, often in a cloud of smoke with roaring thunder and fire to boot.

Okay, so let's for a second -even longer if you like- say that these "gods" (aliens or not) were indeed each specialized in some or other craft or technology.  Sounds kinda logical when -in the case of space farers- you go places where you could use a decent amount of scientists and experts in every field imaginable.  Also, seeing you read in different ancient texts that these "gods" taught all kinds of stuff to a primitive but intelligent local populace.  Stuff like writing, agriculture, mathematics, geography, etc. .

Once these gods departed to wherever they went (or came from), we all of a sudden see how "religions" cropped up; religions that -according to us- venerated these magical star beings.  And what do we see popping up as well?  Priests.  Plenty of them.  Teaching what this or that deity left behind.  By the way, maybe in a distant future, people will find "proof" of the veneration of a "god" named Jimi Hendrix who had millions of followers and who taught his flock how to play a weird musical instrument called the "Fender Stratocaster".  The name of the instrument being an indication this Hendrix god spent some time in a layer of the sky, high above the Earth...

Now, to me this sounds more like ancient religious temples were akin to houses of knowledge, where the "priest" was instead a specialist who was a "master" in a certain field and who passed on, to a select chosen few, what had been taught to her/him before.

That "religion" among ancient civilizations wasn't like we know religion today is pretty clear to me.  Today you have church leaders who keep spitting vaguenesses at us, coming up with abstract "knowledge" about even more abstract places like "heaven" or "hell".

In ancient times, priests had a knowledge that was far from abstract.  Priests were people of wisdom, people who knew stuff and to which you went when wanting to know something.

You had "priests" specialized in healing, others specialized in crops and weather forcasts, still others led temples of matters of the heart and maternity and so on and so forth.

The thing is that it is US, today, who call these diciplines "religion" and the masters of those diciplines "priests" in a religious context.  The main reason for this is that most discoveries of ancient civilizations were done by religious folk, or have been researches under the wings of this or that religious institution.

One thing religious people are good at is to explain things in ways that are most favourable to their own religion and the point of view of their masters to whom they pledged allegiance.  Is what has been happening for almost 1800 years now.  To the point that we in fact have two paralel histories: one as things REALLY happened, and one adapted and rewritten by "the church" (guess which one).

At a certain point, things came so far that even science -which in my opinion should be devoid of any kind of religious influences- often started taking contemporary religious conclusions as their basis to build their own conclusions upon.

Normally, when starting from this -rather crooked- foundation, it should be so that after years of research and finding evidence that things weren't exactly as this church had been claiming for all this time, that scientific views would shift and that scientists would constantly adapt their basis as new stuff was revealed.

This is of course what baffles me, that science does NOT adapt their starting pont to their findings, but have been doing -and still do- exactly the opposite: they adapt their findings to their foundation!!

Excuse me for saying so, but this is flabbergasting and, quite frankly, wrong.  I mean, it's like saying that the lowest number one can count to is minus 4000 and that, whatever means of calculus you use, anything that comes out below minus 4000 is impossible because it was established that minus 4000 is the limit.  This strongly reminds me of the "experts" who claimed the Earth was flat and that any hint at our planet being a globe was answered with a bale of hay and a match under yer arse.  Or other experts and scientists claiming the speed of sound could never be attained, let alone breached.

By the way, I find it extremely strange that a lot of these so-called experts, are in fact not at all experts.  They think they are because they spent several decades in the field.  But, it takes more than staying in "the field" for decades to become an expert.  I mean, how can spending time studying artefacts give you the nomination of an expert when all you did was try to fit your findings into a pre-established timeline, a timeline which was done by holding glyphs next to wrongly translated bible texts and oracling that everything fits neatly while in reality nothing fits at all?

The only expertise I can discern is that of fiddling with the facts in order to be able to maintain a self established truth.

To me, it is a fact that ancient religions weren't religions, but sciences.  Priests weren't such as seen in our religious context; they were scientists.  Not mumbling weirdos wearing dresses selling incomprehensible paragraphs of mumbo-jumbo as a certain thruth with a hithertho not yet clarified meaning, but people of knowledge who were instructed to pass on that knowledge to a select few.

Why a select few?  Simply for reasons of making things not too complicated.  Writing things down exactly as they should was a long process -an expertise all by itself.  More students meant more books had to be written.  Also more books would be read and lent out with a risk of losing valuable books and writings.

This is also one of the things that get me cranky: the explanation by some of our modern day scientists and experts that writers from the past like Homeros or Plato would keep themselves occupied with writing fiction.

Wake up folks!  Before the invention of the printing press, writing wasn't done for pleasure!  People only wrote down what was extremely important to them, important enough to write down for future reference.

Anyway, a rather long piece to say so little.  Just that I feel religion wasn't religion at all in ancient times, at least, not as we live our "modern" day religions.  Simply because first of all, "gods" were part of people's daily lives.  Not some entities one needed to go worship on Sunday.  No, they were part of people's lives because the gods all had a meaning to the different practices in ancient societies.  Gods of wine, gods of war, gods of plants and trees, gods of prosperity, gods of fertility, gods of beauty, gods of this, gods of that...

Today, you have a god which doesn't even have a name in christian belief.  Jaweh or Jehovah are the most common names in Judaism, but for some reason the christians don't have a name for their god...

Speaking of Jehova... this reminds me that "god" was not the only one and that christianity (just like Judaism) isn't a monotheistic religion, as the RC church has been claming right from the start in AD325, but that's for another blog, one of these...

JJ

AsRock Z77 Extreme 11 Motherboard

This is a bit of a continuation of my "Seagate Constellation" post from 22 June 2013, in which I mentioned my predisposition to squander money on a new mainboard.

Well, I finally did, a couple of months back.  And to make things worse, I also bought  new CPU, an Intel Ivy Bridge i7 3770K.

Initially, that AsRock Extreme 11 mainboard would have set me back around 450 Euro, but by the time I had gathered the money, I found one on eBay for 286 Euro.  Since my keen eye stumbled across the Intel i7 3770K processor earlier, for the nice price of 220 Euro, I decided to get both.

Okay, so that's just over 500 Euro, but it's only 50 Euro over what I would have paid for the mainboard alone, so, hey, sue me...

Mainboard works like a charm, too.  Except that it's a bit slower when booting-up.  Has to do with the tests the SAS chip performs when looking for attached SAS hard drives.

Also, after some two months of use, the small 40mm cooler which sits atop the SAS chip, started making annoying noises.  Those noses quickly turned into some serious howling, akin to what is expected of a werewolf with a severe tooth-ache.

So, I decided to buy a new cooler.  Found one on eBay, ordered and paid for it and got it 36hrs later... to find out it doesn't fit...

Buggers at AsRock made it so that regular 40mm fans don't go on the board by making their own type of fan which has only three mounting screws, closer to the center of the fan, instead of the regular four at the corners of the fan's armature...

Ah well...  Since the noise was meanwhile of a variety that makes your average PC user end up in the loony bin after longer periods of exposure, I decided to simply disconnect the fannus lupus.

Kept a worried eye on the temperatures, to only come to the conclusion that the fan does exactly... nothing.  With or without this fan, the temps on the chip stay the same.  Beats me why they added a fan, then.

In any case, I'm going to send an email to AsRock with a complaint about the board's fan in order for them to send me a new one, since the board is still under warranty for another 18 months.

Or I might try and find a way to dismount the cooling block from the mainboard (which again is mounted in such a way you can't reach one of the screws) and add a cooling block with fan of my own.

There's also the possibility to add a watercooling block for both the SAS chipset and the capacitators to the left of the CPU socket, but the set costs 115 pounds.  Since I'll also have to buy a watercooling set -radiator, water pump, radiator fans, etc.- the lot would cost way too much.

Okay, so taking the risk of operating the board without the cooler is also nuts maybe, but since I never saw any changes in temps, I'll see what happens...

JJ

Time ain't on our side

Crikey, another year has passed in which I didn't write anything at all -at least, here on my blogspot...

Not much has happened in the meantime, really.  I guess time went too fast for anything meaningful to happen.  Or maybe some meaningful stuff DID happen but I'll only notice it in a few years from now.

One of the reasons I've been away is because I took up gaming again and also did a lot of reading.  Especially on my favoutite subjects, which are science-fiction and ancient alien/ancient advaced civilizations.

Regarding the possibility of more advanced civilizations having existed in our past, I wonder why people are so adamant against the idea.

I mean... I know that we've been indoctrinated for centuries about our history, especially under the influence of religion.  The buggers have, after all, kind of rewritten our history for us.  This revised history is also what the "established" excavators and so-called scientists seem to cling to, regardless of the obvious proof that a lot of what they tell us is bogus.

You only have to turn your keen eye to Egypt and especially the Giza plateau and the pyramid of Cheops/Khufu to be confronted with literally tons of anomalies.  Anomalies which can only be explained to satisfaction when one takes into account the possibility of power tools.

Now, of course, the mentioning of power tools being used in a time at least 2500 years before zero has many people raising their eyebrows and look at you with "tin-foil-hat alert" all over their face, but when considering the facts (yes, FACTS) there simply is no other possible explanation.

The fairytale that 300-plus tons granite blocks have been transported across 750km of desert sand and dunes by means of wooden rollers has had its moment in the spotlight, but by now every child should know that such a feat is impossible.  Yet, that is exactly what "experts" still claim happened.

But I'm not in the mood right now to go deeper into the subject.  I'll do that on a later date.  maybe in a year from now, who knows...

JJ

Sinners

We, Humans, are supposed to be sinners.  The lot of us.  That is, according to religious folk.

But me being me, I have thought things over a touch and came to the conclusion that we, Humans, can never be sinners, at least, not in the religious sense.

Because there's only two possibilities.

One, god, with his ability of foresight in combination with his greater plan, has measured out our lives, for every single person which was ever born and for every person that still has to be born: all our lives are written in stone because that's what god has planned.

So, if god has planned our lives for us, how on earth can we sin? Since whatever we do was in god's plan?

Two, god's plan includes free will for each and everyone of us.  Thus, god has no control over most of what we do.  If we, in our capacity of free-willed beings, should do something which religious folk call a sin, then they should blame god since he gave us a free will.  When using our free will we fulfill god's wish and thus cannot sin.

So, you see, religious people should do their homework and stop calling everybody who doesn't think along their lines a sinner, because, guess what, we are unable to sin, since however you look at it, whatever we do, it's god's will.

But, while we're at it, let's also have a look at those so-called religious people.  When we take a real close look, we must conclude that they are not religious at all.  No siree.  Because, 99.9% of religious people are mistaking church for religion.

That's right.  There are no religious people.  Only folks who are part of a church and follow the dogmas of that church.  Since those people lost the ability to think for themselves, they let their church leaders do the thinking.  And those church leaders have only one thing in mind and that is to further their private non god-inspired agenda and keep on fooling their flock into thinking that the church holds the truth and nothing but the truth, amen.

Thou shalt not falter is one of the cherished retorts from the church.  Why?  Because when people veer from the path, the church loses its grip and there's a big chance the people start thinking for themselves again.  The church --whatever church-- can't have that.  That's tantamount to blasphemy, treason even.  No, no, you *have* to keep the faith.  Otherwise the church would lose its reason of existence...

Because, in the end, the church has but one goal and that goal is to secure it's own existence, its own future.

And that, to finish with a contradicto in terminis, is a real sin.

JJ