A dog is never to old to learn new tricks so, heck, why not try to learn some bits of a new language in my 32th year on this planet. It may even come in handy when playing other, future Japanese import games.

I have always found “language” an intriguing thing … how the first cave-dwellers grumbled and how it this slowly developed into a spoken language, while the written language developed alongside.

As for study-tools, Kiten, a KDE program I knew exists, or the program it is derived from, aren’t natively available on OSX. I found something called Tensai but the author wants $30 as a registration fee so I’m not even trying the not-even-that-crippled free version. JEDict is the shareware program that I am using at the moment (together with some online resources).

Reading Japanese websites is like decoding encrypted messages, with the advantage that the “key” is constant… and you start to recognise characters and see relationships… and that’s cool.

Sure, the novelty of it may all wear off the moment I’m done with the game… but still, it keeps ones mind busy, so to speak…

(The game hasn’t arrived yet and neither has my new Public Enemy CD yet dropped on my doorstep… so that both kinda sucks in a little-boy-anxiously-waiting-for-his-new-toy kind of way.)

Curious as to what the ‘truth’ is, I started browsing around and read that, indeed, Christians converted the whole lot of them, through a ritual called “siqqitiq”:

(From wikipedia.org):
Siqqitiq (meaning transforming one’s life, more specifically adopting Christianity) is the ritual of converting Inuits with shamanist beliefs to Christianity. This is usually accompanied by ritualistic consumption of foods held taboo by shamanist belief (like caribou lung and heart), to underscore the fact that such taboos no longer apply.

Mkayy, well….. what can I see other than: “That’s bloody typical”. Kinda like force-feeding Islamic people pork — something they’d do if they could get away with it, I’m sure.

Incidentally, through this blog post I hit this story about someone that has been in that area and how Christianity is the default belief over there. It’s amazingly sad how, once again, Christianity wiped out a entire belief and assimilated yet another culture.

I think the term ‘punk ass religious fanatic bitches‘ applies to them just fine…

The original line in Occam’s work refering to this principle is:

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

The content of the site really is sickening and vile. Of course, such a site should be taken down, but denial of service attacks are childish. And, everybody has a right to express themselves, even a white supremacist.

But… this isn’t expression… To go to that an extent to tell everybody how good the ‘white man’ is and, for instance, what things the black man did not invent?! These assholes probably don’t even realise that inventions are always invented in different places by different people: our brains all function the same thus we can do exactly the same.

Although I do think these white fucks have a serious mentality problem, it is almost that sad that it makes you feel sorry for them…

But hey, what idiots are we expecting morality from a bunch of idiots that like to dress up like women and give eachother names?

Anyway, I noticed the link in question is still on the first page of Google’s search results…. and because I don’t have to time and resources to quickly create a spoof ‘whitesupremacists.org’ website spreading misinformation about them, including some well-shot videos detailing on their buttfuck-fests, well, here goes:

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

Then again — I’d hate to see their page go away; perusing the page on rap lyrics, I noticed some songs I really gotta pick up…

Damned whidiots.

I didn’t know the creator of the first ‘lie detector’ and Wonder Woman were one and the same guy. And that, in 1938, William Moulton Marston once did some tests with his creation for Gillette, and deceivingly claimed these tests proved that people found Gillette to be the best razor. They really proved the opposite, though….

Well, anyways, the most important thing that I heard is that the public television station BNN is airing the documentary Loose Change 2nd Edition. That little station has got some cojones (and probably not that much ad-income to risk loosing).

OK, of course, it’s at an impossible time (at 23:35) but still — there’s some television station actually airing the documentary. So, this coming 10th of September, at 23:35 on NL2, it’s there for you to watch if you haven’t seen it.

The documentary definitely puts some things in perspective.

I run into a lot of people that never heard of the Northwood documents, or think that a couple of criminals wouldn’t kill 3000 innocent people, et cetera. (Make mental note: family birthdays are not really the place to discuss 9/11, or any politics at all.)

Well anyways, it’s cool that it’s gonna be aired; and that it even made into the TV guide information, usually ‘the man’ puts a stop to it before it gets that far, just like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 finally never aired.

But we’ll see — it’s not the 10th of September yet…

911, Loose Change

Over the recent years I’m having this increasing interest in history and the evolution of human knowledge, so to speak. The ancient Greek philosophers of course and stuff like etymology for instance quite interest me. It’s funny to see how words have evolved in different languages, coming from the same stem.

I’m a computer-programmer and it has been said that C is the Latin of programming languages. Ever since I was a kid I was interested in artificial intelligence and wanted to code a program that seemed intelligent and could interpret and even converse. Later in life I discovered a thing like the Turing test as well and the topic has always kept my mind busy; thinking of ways to ‘classify’ words, so it could interpret, conclude and react. An amount of understanding language is quite significant. Latin being the mother of modern western languages, I decided I’d study it.

Also, some knowledge of Latin comes in handy if you’re into plants. See, when watching English documentaries, sometimes ‘native’ English terms are used which I’m not familiar with. The Latin name of plants is the same everywhere. Thing is, those Latin names are hard to remember if you haven’t got a clue as to what they mean.

I also have this belief that keeping the mind busy, i.e. like learning a new language, is beneficial and keeps all the gears oiled-up, if you know what I mean.

So yesterday, I started picking up Latin from the book Latin for Beginners by Benjamin D’Ooge, which is quite nicely broken up into separate ‘lessons’ and so far it’s a good read and I’m actually picking up stuff. It’s good to find out that my 31 years, 1 month and 2 day-old mind can still suck up data — and the regular ‘aha-erlebnis‘, for instance when seeing how etymologically some words in different languages are ‘tied’ to eachother, keeps me interested too.

Anyways, one I couldn’t really find was the LA Dream Teams’ In The House for quite a while.

Today, I did though — right here.

Enjoy.

Music, Old-School, Electro, LA Dream Team

Quote Of The Week, QOTW

Simply because the official answers to all the questions don’t seem to hold water. It has to be noted that the research shall be done by students that ‘don’t see a conspiracy everywhere’. To quote the teacher: `Soberity should prevail‘. If the students aren’t pressured by oversea CIA operatives — or are overseas CIA operatives to begin with.

Incidentally, the results will be presented in September (the eleventh, perhaps?). Oh well, The Man will probably say that these Dutch have been smoking too much…

911, WTC, Conspiracies, War On Truth, War On Terror, Bush

My girlfriend is basically with me on this and she has got this book about herbs and their medicinal uses. That book contains the most interesting facts about many plants.

As I am having a slight health-issue at the moment; I’m drinking some sage-tea:

I boil some water, pick a few leafs, and pour the hot water over the leafs and let it stay there for about 10 minutes. Then it’s good to drink, or, if you got a sore throat or infections in the mouth, just rinse your mouth with it and spit it out. The active compounds, essential oils among others, kill bacteria that cause illness and help the body fight against all kinds of infections.

The plant in question, the Salvia Officinalis was long praised for its medical uses by the ancients. Martin Luther is credited with once saying that, Why should a man die whilst sage grows in his garden?.

And indeed… Why should a man go to the doctor whilst sage is growing in his garden? Isn’t it also true that, what does not kill a man, only makes him stronger?

Salvia, Sage, Health, Medicine, Nature

Aha — that must be the same ‘special’ circumstances under which, back in the day — when the export of 128bit encryption was still prohibited — the US allowed India to buy this ‘illegal’ encryption technology (if I remember correctly, those were for, surprise, nuclear facilities too)…

Nukes, India, Pakistan, USA

But there is this other thing in the rabbit pellet mix that I couldn’t put my finger on as to what it exactly was, some brown, shrunken piece of, well, ‘stuff’. The only thing I knew is that, when I tasted it myself, it had a bit of a sweet taste, so I assumed it to be some fruit of some sorts. I hadn’t given it any more mind until 2 weeks ago, when my girlfriend noticed that there was a seed still in the dried fruit-like thingy.

Curious as I am, I got the seed out, put it in some pot and made a promise to regularly water the soil so it can actually grow. For the heck of it, I threw other seeds (mostly grass) from the rabbit-mix into some soil as well.

Days passed, and nothing happened.

Impatient as I am, I removed some of the soil to look at the seed and it looked like it was opening up. Few days later, you could see a stem growing. I immediately moved the pot to a more sunny spot. The other seeds weren’t doing anything, by the way.

Being busy, we totally forgot about it again, until yesterday when I saw that the stem was now standing upright with 2 leaves on the top:

It was only then that I started thinking that I now really need to figure out what type of plant this is. So I grabbed my laptop, googled a bit and I ended up at various animal food grocers websites, reading the ingredients of their pellets until I read ‘Johannesbroodboom‘ (tr: ‘St. John’s Bread tree‘ — obviously something biblical is going one here). Wondering whatever the heck that is, I tried to find an image of said tree. I found it, and also found out that another word for this thing is ‘carob tree‘ and it can grow to about this big:

These trees have pods. These pods are dried and because of its high energy, high fiber content, it’s put in various animal foodstuffs and has been used as an alternative for sugar and chocolate for ages:

Strangely enough the seeds in the pods are called ‘locust beans‘.

The most interesting fact I read about these seeds is that these weigh about 24 mg — just about as must as one carat of gold — so people used these seeds to weigh gold. The seed of the carob tree was called ‘keration’, meaning ‘the fruit of the carob’, and that’s where the word ‘carat‘ comes from we all use.

Of course, although I love the sheer size and shape, I’m not letting this thing grow as big as on the above black-and-white image, but will put it in some container. I do wonder what species of carob this exactly is because, some of them are hermaphrodite and self-furtile, but a lot aren’t.

It is very likely I will never see any fruit developing — but that won’t take the fun out of trying.

Rabbits, Food, Seeds, Growing, Carob

Before today, I didn’t know anything about this event and it surely pisses me off how, seemingly (well, ‘obviously’ in my humble opinion), the police is purposely absent so those damn KKKrackers can go down on the protesters. And I really mean go down: it’s all caught on tape.

It pisses me off more how afterwards, the guy that right away makes a load fuss about the police’s lack of presence being coincidental — he’s getting his ass hauled away by them.

The adrenaline surely boils to hear that those KKKrackers were found innocent by an all-white jury.

To top it all off it’s surely distressing to read about the injustice that happened to Kwame Cannon, some 7 years later.

Two major instances where the ‘justice’ system once again got abused (raped) as it has done in so many other cases.

Pretty sickening stuff, to severely understate it.

Greensboro, Massacre, KKK, Police, Injustice

The fact that they have again chosen to release grainy and foggy images which only lead to more speculation tell us two things.

1) The government truly is frightened to death of releasing any images which accurately depict what happened at the Pentagon because it doesn’t jive with the official version of 9/11.

2) Or the government knows that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon and has clear footage of the incident, but is deliberately releasing these speculative images in order to stoke the debate so it can later release the high quality video and use it to debunk the entire 9/11 truth movement.

The media obsession with this one facet of an entire smorgasbord of 9/11 questions, and their refusal to address more hardcore 9/11 evidence, leads us to fear the latter explanation is the case.

Fact is, in these day-and-age you can’t trust anything. Time will tell, they say. But will it?

911, War On Truth, War On Terror, Flight 77

“Animals don’t seem to sense radiation and will occupy an area regardless of the radiation condition,” says radioecologist Sergey Gaschak.

“A lot of birds are nesting inside the sarcophagus,” he adds, referring to the steel and concrete shield erected over the reactor that exploded in 1986.

“Starlings, pigeons, swallows, redstart – I saw nests, and I found eggs.”

There may be plutonium in the zone, but there is no herbicide or pesticide, no industry, no traffic, and marshlands are no longer being drained.

It even appears that the rare species of Przewalski’s horses are even breeding there. (If you check the Wikipedia article, you’ll note its conservation status is criticial.) Incidentally I happened to see a documentary some time ago about Chinese biologists and their breeding-programme to keep this species alive so it’s a good thing they are ‘surviving’.

Amazing eh, nature? It’ll fall back on its feet as long as you keep the humans at bay.

BTW if you never caught this in the past, for a real spooky series of photos check out this tour through the Chernobyl-area by motorbike. It’s pretty impressive and it nicely shows the consequences of the dangers of nuclear energy when things go terribly wrong (which they will, in the end)…

I do think the radiation is bound to have some effect on the genes, negative or positive. For all we know, these species could somehow have now evolved into a more radiation-resistant type.

But I leave that to the real scientists to found out.

Chernobyl, Radiation, Nuclear Energy, Nature

Now, of course, that alone isn’t all that interesting, but did you know this?

The Piero Umiliani version of the song was originally featured on the soundtrack to the Swedish soft-porn documentary “Sweden: Hell or Heaven“?

I didn’t…

It took me a while to find the original song, but I found a preview of it on this site if you want to listen to it.

It also seems that a certain Sesame Street version of the same song was shown on TV 2 years before the Muppets version aired. Don’t know if that same Sesame Street ever aired here in the Netherlands, but I only remember the Muppets-version.

Additionally, I also found out that:

Despite one of his previous creations, Big Bird from Sesame Street, having been on the cover of Time magazine the year before, Henson was unable to get funding in the US for his new project, The Muppet Show. Eventually, having made several distress calls, he was finally offered a deal by Lew Grade at ATV, on the understanding that Henson came over and filmed The Muppet Show in the UK.
[..]
And so Henson and his colleagues packed their Muppets in a series of giant trunks, and left sunny California for rainy, recession-hit Britain. That much of the story is fact.

Where it crosses the border into righteous apocrypha, however, is on the night that they landed in the UK, when Henson’s people started unpacking the Muppets. As they celebrated their new project, and discussed ideas for the forthcoming shows, they are said to have carefully removed from the heads of their Muppets a generous supply of the best psychedelic drugs the West Coast had to offer. Dr Teeth and The Electric Mayhem were devoted to prime West Coast marijuana while Kermit, apparently, had the acid.

It seems nobody can really verify whether the above story is really fact, but it sure would explain where some of their crazy (but funny) ideas came from.

Muppets, History, Music

The OP finds the list quite surprising whereas I don’t: I already was aware of the fact that a lot of our current civilisation and intellect come from the Middle-East.

Then again, I bet a lot of people didn’t know this, so in that respect, it’s a good thing that this gets some attention. The Muslim-world isn’t as ‘undeveloped’ and ‘primitive’ as a lot of other governments would like us to think.

I have always been amazed that the fact that the Persian calendar is terribly accurate compared to the Gregorian calendar — an inaccurate piece of crap that we still use.

Inventions, History, West, Islamic

I heard this theory before that the US might have been behind it, but any substantial references were always lacking. (And I never actually took the time to research, err, Google it.)

But thanks to the internet it’s all out there.

This ain’t no theory anymore: it seems the US actually spent $10 million to fund its research and development with bill HB-15090. Those guys are evil!

AIDS, New World Order, Genocide, US

Rabbits, Animals

The question they asked was `Who predicted the 9/11 attacks on New York & World War II?‘

Funny thing is: the thing about 9/11 is totally wrong:

Anyway, quibbling over words is futile, given that Nostradamus didn’t even write the passage. He died in 1566, nearly a hundred years before the date of attribution. The quatrain in question is nowhere to be found in his entire published oeuvre. In a word, it’s a hoax.

More precisely, its attribution to Nostradamus is a hoax. The passage was lifted intact from a Web page (since deleted from the hosting server due to overwhelming post-9/11 traffic) containing an essay written several years ago by college student Neil Marshall entitled “A Critical Analysis of Nostradamus.” Marshall invented the quatrain to demonstrate — quite ironically, in light of its subsequent misuse — how a Nostradamus-like passage can be so cryptically composed as to lend itself to myriad interpretations.

 
See how the media simply assumes something to be true and tries to serve it as fact? Do you realize how easily this could be done with other so-called facts?
 
Anyways, reading some of his quatrains got me thinking — I had learned of Nostradamus before, predicting an anti-christ with a blue turban that would attack on 1994… In the following quatrain:

Mabus then will soon die, there will come
Of people and beasts a horrible rout:
Then suddenly one will see vengeance,
Hundred, hand, thirst, hunger when the comet shall run.

..most people rather read Osama or Saddam in stead of the following explanation:

Contemplating Mabus it occurred to me that, if you turn the “M” upside down and substitute the “a” for an “h,” Mabus is an anagram for W Bush. During the 1980′s many noticed that Ronald Wilson Reagan is numerological 666 (six letters in each name). They point out that Reagan introduced Performer Q, the Hollywood Who’s Who, when President of the Actors Guild, which is constantly maintained at exactly 666 stars (“Parade Magazine,” March 11, 1979). When Governor of California, Reagan introduced the Universal Price Code (UPC) which all contain three sixes, at the beginning, middle and end of each mark, according to “The New Money System” by fundamentalist Christian, Mary Relfe, 1984. The April 30, 1987 “San Francisco Chronicle” ran the headline: “Is 666 St. Cloud a Presidential Address? A Visit to Mr. Reagan’s Neighborhood” (Section B, page 1). The Reagans moved to 666 St. Cloud Drive in 1989 and made headlines again when Nancy had the address changed to 668 to avoid the Antichrist stigma. John’s Revelation, Chapter 13, states that this Antichrist, whose name numbers 666, “will cause all, both rich and poor, to receive a mark with the number of his name in their right hand and between their eyes.” This is called “the image of the beast.”

History is replete with people accusing political foes of being the Antichrist. Yet how could Nostradamus possibly have foreseen “Mabus” being an anagram for the Third Antichrist some 500 years ago?! Was Nostradamus just lucky to have likewise predicted the names and atrocities of Napoleon (“Pau Nay Oloron”) and Hitler (“Hister”)?

The article I refer to has a good conclusion which I also support:

I don’t claim to know the answers. I’ve been working on this article for three months since September 11th and the only thing I can say for sure is that Nostradamus and Orson Welles are extremely fascinating characters. Did they really see the future? Or are tyrants merely force-fulfilling their terrifying visions in order to conquer the world? Only time will tell.

Propaganda, Misinformation, War On Terror, 911, Nostradamus

The first Western scientists to visit and study the Dogon people were French anthropologists Drs Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who initially made contact with them in 1931, and continued to research them for the next three decades, culminating in a detailed study conducted between 1946-1950. During their work, these anthropologists documented the traditional mythology and sacred beliefs of the Dogon, which included an extraordinary body of ancient lore regarding Sirius ­ the brilliant, far-distant Dog Star.

Their priests told them of a secret Dogon myth about the star Sirius (8.6 light years from the Earth. The priests said that Sirius had a companion star that was invisible to the human eye. They also stated that the star moved in a 50-year elliptical orbit around Sirius, that it was small and incredibly heavy, and that it rotated on its axis.

Sirius – which we now call Sirius A – was not seen through a telescope until 1862 and was not photographed until 1970.

The Dogon name for Sirius B (Po Tolo) consists of the word for star (tolo) and “po,” the name of the smallest seed known to them. By this name they describe the star’s smallness — it is, they say, “the smallest thing there is.”

They also claim that it is “the heaviest star,” and white.

The tribe claims that Po is composed of a mysterious, super-dense metal called sagala ­ which, they declare, is heavier than all the iron on Earth. Not until 1926 did Western science discover that this tiny star is a white dwarf ­ a category of star characterised by very great density. In the case of Sirius B, astronomers have estimated that a single cubic metre of its matter weighs about 20,000 tonnes.

Now, of course, this sounds terribly amazing and very hard to believe — and of course the story created lots of skepticism around the globe: How can a ‘primitive’ tribe know these things?

To summarize this, and another article I read today, skeptics think that the Dogon probably got the information, not from aliens, but from other cultures on Earth itself. Carl Sagan, the famous American astronomer that wrote the book Contact, also thought that the Dogon culture could not have known about Sirius B without contact with an ‘advanced’ civilization.

Thing is, the existance of these celestial bodies has only fairly recently been discovered, and it is highly unlikely that the Dogon changed their whole religion because of a few meetings with another culture, as there are no accounts of similar incidents in history at all.

Fish People
The most intriguing part of their Theory of Creation is that it claims to have gotten all the astronomical knowledge from the Nommos, ‘amphibious beings’ that were sent to Earth for the benefit of mankind. These fish-like creatures seem to appear in other religions as well. (Incidentally, that page also includes a reference to Zoroaster, a religious symbol I also found a reference to yesterday when I was researching where this whole Christinsanity religion comes from and believe now that most of the Bible has been plagarized from the Mithra-story. But I digress.)

This sounded fairly familair too:

The Nommo was crucified and resurrected and in the future will again visit the Earth, this time in human form. Later he will assume his amphibious form and will rule the world from the waters.

(On a side note, combine that with:

Mithra was believed to have been the son of God (Ahura Mazda). According to Persian tradition, Ahura Mazda sent his son Mithra to defend humanity from evil and from the Adversary, Ahriman. Mithra was also believed to have been incarnated in human form, born from the immaculate conception of his Virgin Mother, Anahita, around 200 BC had a last supper with his 12 apostles before he died for the sins of humanity.

and put 2 and 2 together to find out that ’4′ has been totally plagarized.)

Dogon, Mithra, Intelligent Design, Religion, Myths