If the Illuminati are real, I want to join

There's two options: The illuminati are either real or they are not.

If they are real, I want to join; and if they aren't-- I want to start them up. Having god-powers to control all the major events in world history for our own nefarious ends sounds like a sweet deal. But wait, what are our nefarious ends?

Gaining control of everything? That can't be true-- The illuminati have *always* been in control of everything, including the weather. There's literally no way to stop us, so like, why even bother thinking about it?

We, the Illuminati, offer you something that you desire: a sense of purpose in a cruel, random, and unforgiving universe. We give you a story about why bad things happen to good people. We provide the illusion of order in a random chaotic universe.

So long as you have us in charge, you don't have to think about how totally terrifying it is that nobody is actually in charge of this chaotic nonsensical shitshow we call life.

Not convinced? Just imagine a world without the Illuminati, and you'll see why you need us.

Shootings would happen not because it's a false flag operation, but because some random asshole has a gun!!! Yikes! If that were the case, mass shootings would happen like, every year! What if the nearly 100 people who die of gun violence every day in America, die for no reason, other than some other asshole has a gun? Wouldn't you rather it instead be part of our plan to slowly eradicate the human race in accordance to the Georgia Guide Stones? Because, if it wasn't our doing, that would mean that nearly 100 people die every day for no reason! That's really scary and upsetting!

Or what about extreme weather events!? If it wasn't for HAARP controlling the weather, extreme weather would be caused by naturally occurring meteorological forces that we've got no control over! Do you really want to feel powerless like that? I mean, it sounds really stupid to ascribe human motives like anger or malice to uncaring, unconscious weather systems that are literally not alive, and are just the product of a confluence of natural physical forces. If it wasn't for the Illuminati, weather systems would destroy people's homes for no reason! How terrifying! It's almost like it could happen to anybody! And for no reason! And it's not just the result of a kind of primitive thinking, like how the Vikings ascribed bad weather to the anger of Freya or Thor-- the Illuminati aren't actually gods. They are people who use their science powers, and their reverse engineered alien tech, and their special Jewish powers that only Jewish people get, to amass incredible amounts of wealth and power so that they can control the fabric of reality like gods. Which is why science is bad, and anything beyond your capacity to understand should be destroyed. That's so much more rational, don't you think?

If we got the illuminati out of controlling medicine, we'd have single payer healthcare by now (but no pharmaceuticals, because drugs are chemicals and are therefore bad-- unless that drug is marijuana, which has lots of chemicals that cure literally EVERYTHING).  Or the opposite of Single Payer, because big government is bad, and we could all just retreat into our fallout bunkers and we'll just eat hydroponically grown kale and never die of anything because when you live underground, you can't get poisoned by chemtrails.

It goes without saying that the government is controlled by the illuminati, but what if it wasn't?  That would mean that the ruling class instituted a sham democracy so that they could exploit the working class! That sounds like something Karl Marx would say!  And we all know, Karl Marx was Illuminati, because he was ethnically Jewish, and used his special Jewish Powers to create communism-- which is not a form of democratic control of the workplace and society-- it's a ploy by the Illuminati! Why?  We're not sure.  We did that one just for fun, I guess.

If the illuminati didn't control financial sector? It'd be chaos!  Stock prices would rise and fall with the anarchic forces of the market! And what then?! Why, we'd just have a bunch of greedy rich people fighting with one another to be the ones who are best able to enrich themselves at the expense of the working class and the environment! That sounds like boring old capitalism.  There's no magic there.  No thanks.  Give me that zazzle, zing, pow-- give me that Illuminati!  Capitalism could totally work if it wasn't for the Illuminati!

((psych!  The whole "capitalism would work if it wasn't for the illuminati is actually a double-fake, by us, the illuminati!  We use Capitalism to maintain our control over everything!  That's how good we are!  I put this part in double parenthesis so that way only people who are in the illuminati initiation program with me can read this part, otherwise the secret will get out that the illuminati aren't real and that it's just capitalism, the ruling class, and a complex tapestry of social forces and competing ideologies. Shh! Don't tell anyone!))

Our logo is super creepy looking, right?

Clearly The illuminati are real though, and thank goodness. How do you explain David Rockefeller dying on the first day of the Pagan year? It was a ritual sacrifice! DUH!  There's no way a really old guy with a ton of money (that you ascribe a bunch of weird values from your internalized anti-pagan sentiment that is quite literally a holdover from the Roman Empire's conquest of Europe) could have randomly died on a day that coincides with an arbitrary position of the Earth around the Sun!  And if that is the case, it's quite frankly boring.  Let's give his death magical powers instead!

The trilateral commission! New World Order? That's not internal competition between various sectors of the ruling class! It's us! All us!

Bra-burning feminists and the destruction of the family?  That's not a result of thousands of years of patriarchy, unequal pay, and downward pressure on wages by the ruling class, that's the illuminati. You see, women don't actually want equal rights or equal pay.  Naturally, they are very comfortable with their inferior station in life, and are docile like deer eating alfalfa pellets in a petting zoo. This is because genetically they are just less good than men.  They actually have no agency over their own thoughts and are incapable of thinking for themselves or forming their own opinions. So what's up with all this feminism?! We'll that's just an illuminati thought-program that we poisoned their mind with using mind-control implant chips (you may know them as IUDs) that beam thoughts into their brains using RFID tech. 

((We call them RFIUDs... Shh!)).

Clearly, it's much better to have the Illuminati around. We make bad things happen so you have someone to blame, so you can sleep at night knowing that somebody is in control, so you don't have to be constantly be in a state of existential crisis about the cruel uncaring universe. We provide order to the chaos.

Ancient Aliens Debunked

I'm not saying it was aliens... because it's not.

This is a great documentary debunking the claims of Ancient Aliens, up until the last half hour.

A little disappointed that after talking about the methods that Ancient Aliens uses to "prove" bunk theories, the narrator does the same thing with the story of Noah's Ark.

He goes on to say that "the Nephalim passages prove that Something Weird happened" and that we can't dismiss the fact that similar stories are found in ancient cultures around the world.

However, all that proves to me is that human beings are sex-obsessed and anthropocentric the world over, and that they tell themselves stories of the Gods having sex with humans to prove to themselves that humans are cosmically important. The idea that humans are cosmically important is something that humans love to tell ourselves, because the idea that we're not cosmically important can be damned depressing (but true).

My probme with Ancient Aliens, is that it tries to trade one bogus theory of existence--- religion -- for another, pseudo-scientific new age claptrap.

In the last half hour, this documentary goes on to trade the pseudo-science for religion again, when the real moral of the story should be that most human cultures got it wrong for most of our history, and continue to do so.

I'm really disappointed by the end of this documentary.

Moose don't have a God to tell them what to boink: homophobia, transphobia, science, and religion

The apartment next to mine has a front stoop that manages to carry conversations with perfect clarity to my apartment's second story window.

Normally these conversations are about the usual uninteresting things that college freshman-aged people talk about, like how crazy a party was, or how much they are looking forwards to getting drunk, but occasionally a turdbit [sic] wafts it's way into my living room.

"God didn't create more than two sexes."

I'll admit, my ears perked up at such a nonsensical claim as this. It seemed that this was about to be used as the supporting statement for some hateful bullshit, so I listened in:

The person in question, went on to expound, "I mean, if I looked at your dog, and I was like, 'your dog has a penis, but I think it might be a girl' you'd be like... that wouldn't make any sense."

She went on to explain that this was the reason why gay marriage doesn't make sense.

Ah, Transphobia and homophobia wrapped into one conflating statement!

There's so much wrong with this line of thinking, it's hard to figure out where to start. Having overheard this conversation, however, a roommate of mine and I discussed and came to the following counterpoints:

* 'God' didn't 'create' any sexes at all.
Biology created sex. Evolution created sex. And when it was creating sex, there was still a lot of asexuality going on, even amongst species with divergent sex traits. For instance, Clownfish, the little guys who live in Sea Anemones, and many other species of salt water fish, have only a single sex organ that produces male sex cells early in life, and after a few years, goes on to produce female sex cells. There are species of lizard that reproduce either sexually, if there are males around, or asexually (laying fully fertile eggs without the input of another lizard's DNA) if there aren't any.

* Gender identity and sex are totally different things.
A nifty little cliche to distinguish between sex and gender is, "Sex is what's on the outside, gender is what's on the inside." But it's actually more complex than that. (Of course it is.)

Gender identity is a social construct. Dogs probably don't have gender identity, because they probably don't have the cognitive capacity to tell themselves that sort of a narrative about "society" and their place in it. I love dogs, and they have high Emotional Intelligence, but I really dont' think they're smart enough for human concepts like that. I mean, dogs smell each other's butts.


* Dogs don't get married.
Dogs also don't exhibit a whole lot of sexual discretion. If they did get married, they would probably, in addition to getting both straight and gay married (and cheating constantly, just like humans), also marry plush toys and people's legs. For example:

Exhibit A:

A female miniature pincher being dominant in the bedroom

Exhibit B:

A dog engaging in premarital coitus, making the Baby Dog Jesus cry

And they do so shamelessly and publicly! Most humans who have sex with plush toys do so privately in their own homes. So dogs aren't the best analogue for human social behaviour, especially in regards to marriage, a concept which for dogs, does not exist.

* There are tons of gay animals.
FACT: homosexuality exists in nature, and it's everywhere. Everything from dogs, moose, to parasites in your intestine, all exhibit homosexual behaviour. Even bed bugs do it.

From Wikipedia:

Male bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are sexually attracted to any newly fed individual and this results in homosexual mounting. This occurs in heterosexual mounting by the traumatic insemination in which the male pierces the female abdomen with his needle-like penis. In homosexual mating this risks abdominal injuries as males lack the female counteradaptive spermalege structure.

Seen here: a bed bug gay bar

* Moose and deer will mount anything when in rut, be it another moose or deer (regardless of gender)*, a bison (regardless of whether it's just lawn ornament**) or your pickup truck***.

*Exhibit a

**Exhibit B

***Exhibit c

Basically, the most fundamental argument here is that neither moose, deer, bedbugs nor dogs, have a 'God' to tell them what is appropriate to have sex with and what is not. They will boink anything. They don't shame one another for being gay. They don't have a concept of binary gender, nor binary sexuality. They just boink who, or what, they want to boink. And they seem to be getting along just fine.

But animals are savage!

Sure, animals don't have computers, or advanced civilizations. But that's got nothing to do with homosexuality.

We would not have computers, but for Alan Turing, a theoretical mathematician who in addition to creating the logical foundation for binary code while laying in a field and staring at the sky, was also openly gay during a time in England in which it was illegal to be gay. (Interesting sidenote: he also pretty much single handedly broke the Nazi's "enigma" code, a key factor in winning WWII)

And we wouldn't have an advanced industrialized civilization, nor the concept of macroeconomics, if it wasn't for economic theorist James Maynard Keynes, another openly gay man.

So to wrap things up:

Regardless of whether or not your dog has a penis and thinks it's really a girl dog, that statement is a really lousy supporting statement for whether gay marriage is ethical, natural, etc.

I'm really sick of this argument over gay marriage having to be rehashed every few years, and I really hope to see gay marriage legalized soon. Because frankly, I'm sick of the stupid statements like "Your dog has a penis, therefore gay marriage is wrong."

---

UPDATE

This:

Richard Dawkins on Homeopathy

Stupid Math Tricks

My friends on facebook have been passing around this stupid math trick:


A lot of the math here is slight of hand. I'm working it out right now on the back of an envelope.

You can reduce the equation to (250(80a+1)+2b-250)/2=x

The "+1" is cancelled out after you multiply by 250, when you subtract 250 at the end (250*1=250). So you can just eliminate both of those.

Then you have 250(80a)+2b

Using 111's as your numbers and isolating the parts of the equation you can see the sort of effect that they have.

So if a=111 and b=1111 you can see the following:
250(80*111) = 2,220,000 Or twice the first three digits in your phone number.

When you "+2b", you just get twice the last four digits in your phone number.

When you then divide all those numbers in half, you get your phone number. It's a roundabout way of just entering your phone number into a calculator and then being surprised that you got your phone number.

You're welcome.

Logic: An owners manual for your Brain.

Zombies, Cats, Fungus, Protozoa, and Schizophrenia

Kathleen McAuliffe in the Atlantic wrote an article about Toxoplasma gondii which I found fascinating, and I highly recommend reading all the way through.

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.

One hell of a way to start off an article, eh?

It turns out, it's all true.

In the Soviet-stunted economy, animal studies were way beyond Flegr’s research budget. But fortunately for him, 30 to 40 percent of Czechs had the latent form of the disease, so plenty of students were available “to serve as very cheap experimental animals.” He began by giving them and their parasite-free peers standardized personality tests—an inexpensive, if somewhat crude, method of measuring differences between the groups. In addition, he used a computer-based test to assess the reaction times of participants, who were instructed to press a button as soon as a white square popped up anywhere against the dark background of the monitor.

The subjects who tested positive for the parasite had significantly delayed reaction times. Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected women.

The findings were so bizarre that Flegr initially assumed his data must be flawed. So he tested other groups—civilian and military populations. Again, the same results. Then, in search of more corroborating evidence, he brought subjects in for further observation and a battery of tests, in which they were rated by someone ignorant of their infection status. To assess whether participants valued the opinions of others, the rater judged how well dressed they appeared to be. As a measure of gregariousness, participants were asked about the number of friends they’d interacted with over the past two weeks. To test whether they were prone to being suspicious, they were asked, among other things, to drink an unidentified liquid.

The results meshed well with the questionnaire findings. Compared with uninfected people of the same sex, infected men were more likely to wear rumpled old clothes; infected women tended to be more meticulously attired, many showing up for the study in expensive, designer-brand clothing. Infected men tended to have fewer friends, while infected women tended to have more. And when it came to downing the mystery fluid, reports Flegr, “the infected males were much more hesitant than uninfected men. They wanted to know why they had to do it. Would it harm them?” In contrast, the infected women were the most trusting of all subjects. “They just did what they were told,” he says.

Why men and women reacted so differently to the parasite still mystified him. After consulting the psychological literature, he started to suspect that heightened anxiety might be the common denominator underlying their responses. When under emotional strain, he read, women seek solace through social bonding and nurturing. In the lingo of psychologists, they’re inclined to “tend and befriend.” Anxious men, on the other hand, typically respond by withdrawing and becoming hostile or antisocial. Perhaps he was looking at flip sides of the same coin.

Closer inspection of Flegr’s reaction-time results revealed that infected subjects became less attentive and slowed down a minute or so into the test. This suggested to him that Toxoplasma might have an adverse impact on driving, where constant vigilance and fast reflexes are critical. He launched two major epidemiological studies in the Czech Republic, one of men and women in the general population and another of mostly male drivers in the military. Those who tested positive for the parasite, both studies showed, were about two and a half times as likely to be in a traffic accident as their uninfected peers.

Not only that, but the disease rewires the male brain to cause it to be sexually attracted to the scent of cat piss.

"That's not possible!" you might be saying. Well, there IS in fact, other examples of "zombification" in nature, in which a parasitic organism infects the nervous system of their host to manipulate their behaviour:



What's more, Toxoplasma have a high rate of incident coinciding with Schizophrenia.

Many schizophrenia patients show shrinkage in parts of their cerebral cortex, and Flegr thinks the protozoan may be to blame for that. He hands me a recently published paper on the topic that he co-authored with colleagues at Charles University, including a psychiatrist named Jiri Horacek. Twelve of 44 schizophrenia patients who underwent MRI scans, the team found, had reduced gray matter in the brain—and the decrease occurred almost exclusively in those who tested positive for T. gondii. After reading the abstract, I must look stunned, because Flegr smiles and says, “Jiri had the same response. I don’t think he believed it could be true.” When I later speak with Horacek, he admits to having been skeptical about Flegr’s theory at the outset. When they merged the MRI results with the infection data, however, he went from being a doubter to being a believer. “I was amazed at how pronounced the effect was,” he says. “To me that suggests the parasite may trigger schizophrenia in genetically susceptible people.”

Which brings me to the curious case of Louis Wain, the English painter, whose main focus was anthropomorphic portraits of cats.

Given the extremely high incident of connection between brain deterioration, and infection, I think it's likely that one could conclude that Louis Swain had latent Toxoplasma gondii in his brain, causing his obsession with cats, and his "post-schizophrenia" period is actually just post a period in which the Toxoplasma gondii cysts began to destroy his brain.



Read the entire article here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/8873/1/

SCIENCE! Why it's important

via Potholer54

Neil DeGrass Tyson Agrees: America Sucks Because YOU SUCK

So a while ago, I made this video:

America Sucks because YOU SUCK

And unbeknownst to me, Neil DeGrasse Tyson had posted this much more eloquent and nonpartisan blog entry:

The question, “If I were President I’d…” implies that if you swap out one leader, put in another, then all will be well with America—as though our leaders are the cause of all ailments.

That must be why we’ve created a tradition of rampant attacks on our politicians. Are they too conservative for you? Too liberal? Too religious? Too atheist? Too gay? Too anti-gay? Too rich? Too dumb? Too smart? Too ethnic? Too philanderous? Curious behavior, given that we elect 88% of Congress every two years.

A second tradition-in-progress is the expectation that everyone else in our culturally pluralistic land should hold exactly your own outlook, on all issues.

When you’re scientifically literate, the world looks different to you. It’s a particular way of questioning what you see and hear. When empowered by this state of mind, objective realities matter. These are the truths of the world that exist outside of whatever your belief system tells you.

One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
New York, Aug. 21, 2011

Robert Sapolsky - The Uniqueness of Humans

Day Three: Minneapolis

NASA discovers ALIEN LIFE- here on earth!

According toGizmodo.com NASA announced today that they've discovered a new life form that may well have evolved independently of all life here on earth.

Which lends credence to my crazy theory that all life on earth probably DIDN'T evolve from a common ancestor. My thinking: If life really IS due to chemistry and not some direct divine intervention, there's no reason that it should be rare. In fact it should be as ubiquitous as other things caused by chemistry are. In fact, I see no reason why some of the five kingdoms of life could not have evolved separately from unique origins.

---

UPDATE

Okay, yeah, so it's not nearly as cool as Gizmodo initially made it seem:

pbbbbt

We are like Dust Mites

lyrics

You’re like a tiny little dust mite
sitting on a tiny little dirt clod
spinning ‘round a tiny little star
outer space is always where you are

We’re hurtling through space on a dirt ball with an atmosphere
the only world you know of is the thin film of life that’s here
the atmosphere extends only seven miles vertically
the deepest plot of ocean is just seven miles under me

diameter of earth is eight thousand miles wide
the living that we do is only on the outside
our liquid core is spinning and makes a giant magnet
which we’ll lose when the planet cools and becomes stagnant

Then we’ll get blasted with space radiation
which will dry up all our water and kill all of creation
we got limited real estate in which we can around
only seven miles up and only seven miles down

1.8% of Earth’s diameter is air
it’s a tiny thing we’re fucking up as if it wasn’t there
this is rare- life on earth
occupies a tiny sliver
“Put your conscience in the cosmos.”
is the message I deliver

[chorus]

Maddow: BP is "contaminating" scientists

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