Excellent discussion, provides sweeping strategic and historical overview. ABN
FLASHBACK 2022: Jacinda Ardern illogically argues for internet censorship and ‘curated information’ even after she caused a disaster by forcing her unchallengeable and profoundly mistaken covid policies on New Zealand and the world
PM Jacinda Ardern calls internet freedom a “weapon of war” in most recent UN speech. Calls for a new type of internet with “rules and transparency.”
“How do you tackle climate change if people don’t believe it exists”?
Jacinda, you and your kind decisively lost the argument on internet free speech during covid. You and your kind were wrong about everything–lockdowns, banning early treatment, masks, school closing, mandating vaccines, and more. All wrong. What’s worse is during the pandemic you had free-reign to do what you wanted without being questioned. As a consequence, you and your kind caused a worldwide policy disaster which is still plaguing us today. Its effects will be felt for many generations to come. In contrast, those of us who disagreed with almost everything you forced on your country and the world were polite, reasonable, logical, and far more science- and data-oriented. This contrast between us and you proves decisively that you and your kind lost the argument for controlling internet speech. If our side had been allowed uncurated free speech without censorship and deplatforming, the pandemic would have ended much sooner, early treatment would have ended any need for vaccines, lockdowns would have been stopped or never started, our economies would be fine, and you would not be talking dangerous nonsense at the UN as you are doing above. ABN
first posted September 29, 2022
Trump suing pollster for fraud
Mearsheimer describes Biden’s escalation as self-serving with no real downside; Dugin says it is still possible Russia will be forced to use nuclear weapons
The original title of this vid was way overblown so I had to change it. Posted before watching the whole thing. ABN
Military method can make you nod off in 2 minutes and works for 90% of people, expert says
The method consists of a combination of deep breathing and visualisations in an attempt to ‘shut the body down’, one bit at a time.
You begin by lying in any comfortable position on the bed.
Next come a series of visualisations about relaxing the muscles in each and every part of the body — starting with your forehead.
‘Relax your eyes, your cheeks, your jaw and focus on your breathing,’ Agustin instructed in the clip.
‘Now go down to your neck and shoulders. Make sure your shoulders are not tensed up. Drop them as low as you can and keep your arms loose by your side, including your hands and fingers.’
…Prolonged exhalations are known to rapidly slow down the heart rate, activating the parasympathetic nervous system — a network of nerves that relaxes your body after periods of stress or danger.
The act of intentionally relaxing each part of your body is a type of meditation known as ‘body scanning’, which has long been proven to trigger hormones association with feelings of calm.
Bernardo Kastrup, Richard Watson, and Mike Levin — conversation 1
UPDATE: This is a very accessible philosophical discussion during which Kastrup lays out a clear argument for Analytical Idealism. What Kastrup describes is a very good way to understand Buddhist philosophy, which is based on similar thinking but takes it further. I highly recommend this discussion and other videos and essays by Kastrup. He is a perfect advocate for understanding Buddhism since he seems to be entirely unaware of Buddhist thought and entirely devoid of normative Buddhist cliches. ABN
Making Sense of the Mental Universe — Bernardo Kastrup
The recent loophole-free verification of Bell’s inequalities [Hensen et al., 2015] has shown that no theory based on the joint assumptions of realism and locality is tenable. This already restricts the viability of realism — the view that there is an objective physical world; that is, a world (a) ontologically distinct from mentation that (b) exists independently of being observed — to nonlocal hidden-variables theories. More specifically, other recent experiments have shown that the physical world is contextual: its measurable physical properties do not exist before being observed [Grö blacher et al., 2007; Lapkiewicz et al., 2011; Manning et al., 2015]. Contextuality is a formidable challenge to the viability of realism.
These developments seem to corroborate Richard Conn Henry’s assertion in his 2005 Nature essay that “The Universe is entirely mental” [Henry, 2005: 29]. After all, in a mental universe (a) observation necessarily boils down to perceptual experience — what else? — and (b) the physical properties of the world exist only insofar as they are perceptually experienced. There is no ontological ground outside mind where these properties could otherwise reside before being represented in mind. Indeed, in a mental universe observation is the physical world — not merely a representation of the world — which not only echoes but makes sense of contextuality.
The Visual Word Form Area: A brain region that coevolved with reading and writing — Peter Frost
The Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is a brain region that helps us recognize written words and letters. Without it, reading requires much more effort. When a man suffered an accidental lesion to his VWFA during brain surgery, he lost much of his ability to read while losing none of his general language abilities. After six months, he had partially recovered, but reading still took twice as long as it had before (Gaillard et al, 2006).
The VWFA is composed of neurons that were once used for face recognition:
Thus, learning to read must involve a ‘neuronal recycling’ process whereby pre-existing cortical systems are harnessed for the novel task of recognizing written words. … [Such areas of the cortex] possess the appropriate receptive fields to recognize the small contrasted shapes that are used as characters, and the appropriate connections to send this information to temporal lobe language areas (Dehaene & Cohen, 2011)
This neuronal recycling seems to have become hardwired, at least in some people. After Swiss preschoolers played a grapheme/phoneme correspondence game for a total of 3.6 hours over 8 weeks, an MRI scan showed their VWFAs preferentially responding to images of strings of letters. Yet only a few of the children could actually read, and only at a rudimentary level (Brem et al., 2010).
Humans may have initially identified words by using face-recognition neurons. As reading became more important, natural selection favored those humans who could free up more of their face-recognition neurons for reading. This selection eventually created a large neuronal population dedicated solely to word recognition, i.e., the VWFA.
This article discusses how our ability to recognize faces evolved to also recognize the written word, especially in alphabetic languages. The face recognition areas in the brain can also be partially commandeered by the development of word-recognition skills through learning to read. As someone with poor face-recognition, I wonder what happened to me. I also learned to read Chinese, so who knows what was going on? Apparently, recognizing Chinese characters requires yet another region of the brain. Some information about that can be found in this paper: The Visual Word Form Area: Evidence from an fMRI study of implicit processing of Chinese characters. ABN
President Trump Delivers Remarks to the Press – 12/16/24
8.7-Million-Year-Old Fossil Suggests Ancestors of Humans and African Apes Evolved in Europe
The origin of the hominines (African apes and humans) is among the most hotly debated topics in paleoanthropology.
The traditional view, ever since Charles Darwin, holds that hominines and hominins (humans and fossil relatives) originate in Africa, where the earliest hominins are found and where all living non-human hominines live.
More recently a European origin has been proposed, based on the analysis of Late Miocene apes from Europe and Central Anatolia.
Anadoluvius turkae attests to a lengthy history of hominines in Europe, with multiple species in the eastern Mediterranean known for at least 2.3 million years.
“Our findings further suggest that hominines not only evolved in western and central Europe but spent over 5 million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa, probably as a consequence of changing environments and diminishing forests,” said Professor David Begun, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto.
“The members of this radiation to which Anadoluvius turkae belongs are currently only identified in Europe and Anatolia.”
Dr Andrew Wakefield on the covid vax and its implications concerning childhood vax malfeasance
Lost revisions of the Bible discovered inside 1,750-year-old Syriac manuscript
Hidden for centuries, a forgotten chapter of the Bible has emerged from the shadows of history. Researchers, armed with ultraviolet light and meticulous scholarship, have uncovered a 1,750-year-old text that offers a fresh glimpse into the evolving nature of scripture. This find isn’t just a historical curiosity; it’s a profound insight into how faith and tradition were shaped in early Christianity.
The newly unveiled chapter offers an expanded version of Matthew 12, a passage where Jesus and his disciples are criticized for picking grain on the Sabbath. In this version, subtle textual variations bring fresh theological nuances to light, emphasizing compassion and mercy over rigid observance of religious laws. While the core message aligns with established teachings, these differences hint at the dynamic and adaptive nature of early Christian scripture.
What’s particularly striking is the role of early scribes. Far from being passive transcribers, they actively engaged with the material, reinterpreting and preserving it in ways that reflected their own spiritual and societal realities. This hidden chapter, with its emphasis on mercy, reveals a faith not rigidly bound to dogma but alive with reinterpretation and evolution—a window into the beliefs and priorities of communities navigating the complexities of their time.
American Buddhist Net 