Me in Nizhny Novgorod last weekend.
On a related note, over the past month, I have created/updated several pages on my personal page:
- Russia Travel page, with ratings of Russian cities & links to those I’ve written travel reviews for*: https://akarlin.com/travel/russia/
- Moscow Guide: https://akarlin.com/travel/moscow/
- Saint-Petersburg Guide: https://akarlin.com/travel/saint-petersburg/
Many of the details have yet to be filled in, such as individual museum/attraction/restaurant reviews, but the foundation is there to be gradually built upon.
One of my goals is to have ready references for questions about what to do/where to visit in Russia that I intermittently get from people.
- I have yet to finish Torzhok (last year) and now Nizhny itself. And, of course, the long-promised Poland review, though that will have to wait until I can get my equally long promised Great Bifurcation poast out of the way.
This is the current Open Thread, where anything goes – within reason.
If you are new to my work, start here.
Commenting rules. Please note that anonymous comments are not allowed.
Awesome Moscow guide, a real resource.
Your Petropolis map did not load for me – very nice list of destinations. I look forward to putting your compendium to work next time I’m in SPB – wish I had it eight years ago.
Thank you!
In a bold take, I have concluded that if China actually did everything right, as the Republicans and assorted right-leaning Sinophobes in the United States bellow it should have done, the world would actually have had a great deal more coronavirus infections and deaths due to people having to wait for the outburst of the North Italian pandemic to take the coronavirus seriously:
https://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/2020/10/30/if-china-did-everything-right-on-coronavirus/
Does everyone agree?
The Virgin Donald Trump:
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-INPBYDCcw6Y/XtqpJ7uKMzI/AAAAAAAAQjM/lHnhduIW_t0lU_IwbJk43yJrQxQXyEmHwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/MW-IH821_trump__ZG_20200603130937.jpg
VERSUS
The Chad Mahathir Mohamad
https://sm.mashable.com/t/mashable_sea/photo/default/mahathir-tweet-french-kill-twitter_mqnq.960.jpg
Yeah, Western cope on this has been funny to observe.
USA has had a homicide spike this year. Looks like Russia will finally have a lower homicide rate.
This explains what’s gone wrong in the MSM.
Oh shit, he mentioned the great bifurcation post! The end is nigh!
I think as a general rule of thumb, anyone who lived through the Japanese occupation is more based.
Though as I’ve said previously, I think it demonstrates something deeply wrong with Malaysia that Mahathir was re-elected at age 90 or so. Currently, 95, though not the PM anymore.
Seen today during the anti-lockdown riots in Burgos, Spain.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ElnJ-uIXYAwtzHK?format=jpg&
I wonder what it will be in like 2036….
I am convinced that I could have a more rational, informed conversation with an Arab, an Indian or even a dark as night African than I could with a western European. There’s something about whites with a degree of comfort and stability that makes them so confident in their own ignorance and completely impenetrable to reality. I’ve yet to meet an asian or a hispanic (even a black guy!) whom I couldn’t get to doubt their own beliefs when presented with just the right amount of information.
But not white libs and western Europeans. They can be told just how many people their beliefs have gotten killed and they will still insist that they’re right. They’re just such vile people. I can no longer bring myself to be concerned when one of them gets durka’d in the streets. May the slavs one day rule the husks of their once lovely countries.
Bellingcat busted:
https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1321593971261513728
Don’t entertain any ideas that Slavs won’t defend Western Europeans you despise against people like you.
AK estimates Armenian IQ in the low 90s, and Azeri IQ a few points below that. It’s been suggested in the comments here that Armenian diaspora high performance in business, intellectual fields, etc. is an artifact of brain drain. Leaving aside how plausible that may be, how plausible is the estimate for Azeri IQ?
Notably two of the current chess top 10 are Azeri (Mamedyarov and Radjabov). In fact, Azerbaijan has been somewhat unlucky, as the very talented Gashimov would almost certainly be in the top 10 too if he had not died young in 2014 of brain cancer. Keep in mind Azerbaijan’s population is under 10 million and contemporary chess draws from a talent pool that includes Europe, USA, China, Iran, India …
Two possible explanations – 1) Azeri IQ is higher than Karlin’s high 80s estimate – 2) Chess performance is not strongly IQ-linked. However HBDers often cite Jewish performance in chess as a sign of IQ. So Jewish science performance is a sign of IQ, but their chess performance is just a coincidence?
Why should the Slav defend Western Europeans? After all that Western Europeans did to the Slavs and their ancestors since times immemorial…
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/if-the-world-voted-in-the-us-elections/#comment-4252115
Slavs r us.
I think once you get into the range of less than 20 points or so most of this national-average IQ discussion is increasingly meaningless, Ireland for example jumped a standard deviation or more in 20 years after economic growth, alongside many similar examples. I can’t think of any single example where national IQ studies didn’t simply confirm conceptions that people knew for centuries, and only forgot through ‘learned ignorance’. I think the only issue of critical importance is whether Africans are truly as profoundly dim as the data suggests, and to what degree economic factors play a role in suppressing it.
As for chessmasters, well, it’s not exactly a giant sample size, and there’s an obvious cultural bias in favour of Sovok countries.
Perfect for you pro-Russian leaning folks, who’re not so positive towards Armenia/Armenians:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/us-recognition-kosovo-sets-precedent-artsakh-171749
The author heads some US based Armenian organization.
Aside from the fact that IQ is a very fuzzy measure of intelligence – its primary aim was to remove utter retards from the military, rather than make fine-grained distinctions – the notion that chess is a good proxy is problematic at best.
There was a discussion in another OT about the predictive power of international math competitions. I noted that countries like Georgia or Romania scored above Japan, Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden, among many others.
Interestingly, in the latest international math olympiad, Armenia scored above Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Denmark and Austria. Georgia did even better. It seems these small caucasoid countries are obsessed with these low-stakes competitions like math or chess.
In other words, some countries focus a lot on a select few sports/competitions and do very well on them. That doesn’t tell you a whole lot about their underlying capabilities, only their committments.
EVs now account for 25% of all new car registrations in Europe, surpassing diesel.
https://i.imgur.com/lcjVOep.jpg
Most European countries have 100% of new sales targets far into the future (2030, 2035 and even 2040 for some). We’ll get there much faster. As usual, people are underestimating how fast technological change can happen, since it happens on S-curves.
Nukelets, who keep shilling their overly expensive dinosaur tech, are forced to contend with the fact that their pet hobby project is woefully expensive and inadequate:
https://i.imgur.com/w3hye2o.png
Coal is the last man standing, and barely. It won’t be long before it gets superseeded as well. The intermittency problem is being solved with massive battery innovation and huge production surges all over the world. The only last argument left in favour of nuclear energy is for weapon manufacturing, but you just need one small plant or two for that. As a broad-based energy source, nuclear is dead. Pity the idiot nations who plunge billions into this technology.
Let us invent a region known as ‘Central Europe’ upon whom we can blame all of this
Who’s ringing the bell now?
it cant be a brain drain. Armenians have had a historically an extremely successful diaspora for centuries. Long before the Armenian genocide and expulsion from Anatolia, there were succesful merchant and artesan communities all over Asia and Eastern Europe. Armenians had even a community in Tibet already in the 17th Century and in China there was a large community of Armenians all the way down from the era of the Mongolian empire. Not forgetting their much larger communities in India and especially all over the lands of greater Iran. Historically its known that Crusaders, Persians and Mongols greatly trusted them. The Anatolian turkish genocide is a strange aberration in history, normally Armenians had quite good relations with other people. No matter what the edgy Orwell said. Its an aberration because Armenians had no history of genocides before it. Forced movements yes, but no genocides.
Closer to 2).
Early training is most important in chess (see Polgár sisters); IQ requirement is perhaps 110 for an FIDE master and 120 for a grandmaster, and those can be found in any population.
Disclosure: I know a bunch people with a FIDE rating, including one grandmaster, who coincidentally is the only one among those who isn’t an utter and complete dick.
To be fair, if even Albanians have a right to “self determination” because the US military says so, then why shouldn’t Armenians be able to have the same right? Or any other discontent minority large and concentrated enough anywhere in the world?
Putin was correct when he said that they opened Pandora’s box with Kosovo. It already hit back at them like a boomerang in Georgia and Ukraine. The consequences still aren’t over from it no matter how much they screech muh “special case” (because Serbs are bad, of course).
Still, I find it amusing and well deserved that the EU’s efforts to be a relevant mediator over Karabakh completely flopped because they did Kosovo to Serbia.
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_how_europe_became_marginalised_in_nagorno_karabakh/
Well deserved. Hopefully the EU will hurry up and just die already though …
Anyway, international law is overrated. Historical right to a land (or perception of it) and power levels/military force is all that really matters.
In case you haven’t heard, the EU won’t let Hungary use Sputnik-5:
https://www.rt.com/news/505107-eu-hungary-covid-vaccine/
I know that the Kosovo is rightful Serbian ancestral land, but wouldnt it be better just to try separate still Serbian majority or plurality northern Kosovo from it and leave Kosovo behind? Because if you get Kosovo back, what you are going to do with almost two million Albanians? They are just going to be a huge hindrance for Serbs. Even now Serbia has like 5% of its population Muslims, with Kosovo back its going to be something like 25%. Is it really worth of it?
Interesting that Bulgarian Macedonia, which is known by the name of North Macedonia, has probably 40% of its population Muslims and they will be a majority in the near future. Pew research centre estimates that to happen in the year 2040. Muslims will then have a quite large chunk of Western Balkans.
Vucic actually tried to do this a few years ago but Angela Merkel/Germany vetoed this proposal. Hashim Thaci (Albanian separatist leader at the time), John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Macron were all open to this. It was far closer to happening then many people thought (despite Albanians even trying to grab more land from Serbia proper in Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac).
Problem now is that even though the 2013 Brussels agreement was signed, the Albanians still won’t give Serbs even the fucking minor and pathetic concession of a community of Serb municipalities on Kosovo and Metohija (the real name for Kosovo, or Kosmet simplified). Vucic and Serbia obviously have absolutely no positive incentive/compensation (EU membership was never actually going to happen and still won’t, despite delusions of some Eurotards in Serbia, not that it’s worth it anyway) to recognize Kosmet now. Recognizing Kosmet would be a form of political suicide for Vucic or any other politician in Serbia. Even the Liberal-Croat scum of the Democratic Party didn’t do it from 2000-2012 although they deliberately set the field for the current shitty situation through intentional sabotage of Serbia’s standing over Kosmet. For instance, they allowed the negotiating format to shift to the EU format away from the UN format, they led a UN court to proclaim Kosovo’s secession as legal, etc.
Albanians literally believe they can do whatever the hell they want and that Serbia and Serbs need to simply hurry up, recognize Kosmet, roll over and die (most of NATO, EU and Muslim world also believes this as well). Unfortunately, for the most part, Albanians pretty much can do whatever they want because the US military is on their side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_Agreement_(2013)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Serb_Municipalities
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Bondsteel
Albanians fired warning shots at Serb children and failed to kidnap them in Donja Bistrica a few weeks ago (daily harassment, persecution, theft, assault and literal siege of Serbs in enclaves is the reality of life for remaining Serbs on Kosmet, but world media and even most “domestic” Serb media remain silent about it purposely). Serbia did a military exercise recently with its newest weaponry (the scenario was obviously the Serbian Army going to Kosmet to fight Albanians and resisting a NATO “intervention), but the “UN peacekeepers” together with Albanian armed groups did military exercises to counter at literally the same time (so careful observers know very well what game is afoot). Albanians are also trying to intentionally demolish and build a road right over and through the Serb church of Visoki Decani in Metohija. The patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church also explicitly appealed to Serbs to remain on their ancestral homes on Kosmet …
In such extremely precarious circumstances, Vucic simply tries to preserve the status quo (there are even worse options than that for Serbs right now) through diplomacy (even if it means things like bad optics “agreements in Washington recently) and avoid pogroms against remaining Serbs in enclaves (he mentioned a few weeks ago that Albanians are planning another pogrom against Serbs March 2004 style).
The claimed number of Albanians is absolutely ridiculously high and they deliberately fudge their demographics statistics like Bosniaks (to an even worse degree than Bosniaks, actually). Kosovo has less than 1 million people (look at population censuses throughout history, the number of registered phone numbers and other revealing data) although most of them are obviously Albanians because they ethnically cleansed Serbs over several centuries, but most intensively and recently from 1941-1945, 1945-Milosevic rule (contrary to infamous false claims, Milosevic was too much of a cuck to cleanse Albanians, he only reduced Kosovo’s republic tier autonomy and did his best to halt the cleansing of Serbs in the late 1980’s due to popular pressure and it was his chance to get personal power), and from 1999-2004 (the March 2004 pogrom of Serbs is an exceptional infamy).
If/when Serbs are in such a position, the problem is that there are too many Albanians and too few Serbs on Kosovo. So, what to do?
I don’t know about other Serbs, but I’m absolutely sick of the shit we’ve been copping for the past 30 years and still are to this day, so in my opinion, Albanians should be repaid in kind (exact methods are arguable) …
Yes.
If it’s worth it for Azerbaijan, and the land doesn’t even really belong to them (the Armenian claim from heritage and history is much, much stronger) , then it absolutely is and should be for Serbia.
The north part and northeast part of Vardar Macedonia (Skoplje, Kumanovo, Tetovo etc.) rightfully belong to Serbs while the rest is not clear whether it rightfully belongs to Bulgarians or not. At any rate, Serbs have far more urgent priorities right now.
On this note though, it’s absolutely funny to watch Bulgaria discredit the existence of Monkeydonia lmao.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bulgaria-north-macedonia-eu/bulgaria-says-north-macedonia-must-address-historical-issues-or-face-delay-on-eu-path-idUSKBN27F2VL
So much for the supposed inevitability of EU integration of the “Western” Balkans lol.
This is a myth. The birth rates of Albanians and Bosniaks have massively crashed in the Balkans since the early 2000’s (hence why they deliberately falsify demographic statistics so much). This is partly a product of US military occupation and liberal-cultural hegemony that caused them to abandon their “traditional” aggressive breeding habits (there’s also a large amount of emigration to EU, for all peoples’ of the Balkans).
Still, the Muslim SDA elite in Bosnia is deliberately importing migrants to cleanse the remaining Serbs from the Federation and then intends to use them against Republika Srpska and maybe Croats in Bosnia in the future. Otherwise, whether Muslims will have “quite a large chunk” of the “Western” Balkans depends on the US military and potential future Turkish military force projection (if those two things are serious factors in the future, then quite possibly so).
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1322460016323006465
Not really surprising. CSTO only covers Armenia proper. At the same time, the NYT (house organ of the US Deep State) has been publishing pro-Azeri propaganda non-stop.
Armenia is alone in this conflict and NK will fall.
Even if Azerbaijan invades Yerevan, what makes you think that Russia will not just look the other way, will certainly be cheaper to look the other way.
According to the 2002 Macedonian Census, 46.5% of the children aged 0–4 were Muslim. I know that the birthrates have fallen, but it doesnt matter as long as the birthrate of the Christian Slavs is lower and I dont see any motive for Macedonian authorities to falsify the Census data in such way, especially in 2002.
I totally understand, but I dont think its a good way to solve the problem. Even if geopolitical situation drastically changes. If the Muslims whine and bitch for something like Srebrenica all the time, even the Anatolian turks, whose country is a real country of thousands of real Srebrenicas, it will just ensure that whole Islam will see the Serbs as their mortal enemy. If so happens then I truly shudder from fear when i think all the future 3d movies or simulations, in the 22rd century, where they will show the evil Hitlerian Serbfascist SS-men exterminating peaceloving Albanian mountain hippies, even though those hippies follow the religion of peace.
I cant say I know very well the sufferings of the Serb nation, but I know that Serb population has been ethnically cleansed from Kosovo and remaining Serbs are under a siege, in a hostile situation.
I really do not understand why it was so important for the western powers to take Bosnia and Herzegovina away from Serbs, I understand Croatia and Slovenia, but why Bosnia? A land where Serbs were traditionally the biggest group, just 30 years ago. Yes I know Croats are the greatest back stabbers in the whole European history and what happened in Serbian Krajina was not justice, but I still understand the Western motivations for supporting independent and western leaning catholic Crotia, but I just cant understand the made up problem regarding Bosnia.
In my opinion Croats are worse than Albanians, they have murdered en masse and backstabbed people whose language and God they share, Albanians are understandable, they are Muslims, they have a different history, language and so on, but Croats, even the worst Ukrainian Bandera worshippers were nowhere near as bad or beastlike as Croats. Well there are real Slavs who are Orthodox and then there are those who were successfully colonized by Germans. Soon someones gonna say what about Poland? In Medieval times a large proportion of their cityfolk were German burghers who also mostly ruled towns of Poland proper . Theres nothing wrong in the Germans by the way, but theres something wrong when people willingly let themselves be colonized and are proud of it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe
I didnt know that Mongols invaded Croatia and destroyed Zagreb in the process.
I agree with your position on Kosovo….but Gruzia and Ukraine are very different. For Crimea not only was there the moral, security and cultural concerns to think about..there was also the simple fact that Ukropia , once again, failed to govern itself as another total collapse of the state happened . Disintegration of state , farcically, like that is more than sufficient reason for intervention – it can’t be conflated with “invasion” – especially when nearly all of the military there join the “invader” in Crimea
For Gruzia – these scumbags can’t contradictory use Lenin/Stalin border decisions ( and Ingushetians) in their favour to justify anti-Russian position…….and then use other decisions by the same Lenin/Stalin they claim against them to ….also justify their anti-Russian position. Moronic western faggots should also understand that for what was a chaotic dissolution of the USSR, with a chaotic formation of new countries and a very weak Russian state in the 1990’s and some disconnected groupings of many ethnic groups that left many complicated situations…….it is extreme idiocy to not show any flexibility on early 1990’s border “agreements”. It was practically very different situation to 1945 where inviolability of borders was sensible rule
Yes, I’ve thought about that too. I think two main factors would induce them to intervene:
If Armenia proper was invaded (and likely destroyed by combined Turkish+Azeri forces), then Russia would have to deal with at least a million caucasoid refugees, which would be deeply unpopular even in the best of times but even less so during an economic crisis. Putin therefore has a domestic angle to think about.
Beyond Russia, I doubt the US would sit idly by if Armenia proper was invaded, especially with a Biden presidency. A lame-duck Trump would be under enormous pressure to act if Yerevan was under serious threat in the coming weeks. As I wrote before, NK is seen as an acceptable sacrificial goat. But Armenia proper is another kettle of fish.
Pressure from who? Do you think Sheldon Adelson or Jared Kushner are staying up at night worrying about what might happen to Armenians?
That’s a very mild description. This picture is possibly the best summary that exists of what Croats did to Serbs in the 20th century (can’t get a better image link unfortunately).
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ElCG1SAXIAEHh87?format=jpg&name=small
I’ll reply to the rest a bit later (a lot to cover).
I agree with both parts of your statement.
You’re missing the point with your excessive emotion.
The point is that it was the Georgian Army that attacked Russian troops in South Ossetia in 2008, directly incited by USA and NATO (they event sent the US Navy parallel to Georgia’s coast) with military advisers, weaponry and etc.
Russia literally wiped the floor with Georgia in less than a week in an impressive display of military might. Putin was at the 2008 Beijing Olympics at the time, indicating that this whole war was obviously planned in advance by NATO and the Georgian side. It’s even more impressive when you consider that the Georgian attack failed and despite initial serious losses, the Russian Army held it’s ground and decisively counterattacked its way to victory, with reinforcements of course.
This was when the Russia hysteria truly jumped to a next level after Putin’s 2007 Munich speech where he explicitly announced his intentions to champion Russian sovereignty. With Ukraine in 2014 and Trump in 2016, the hysteria increased by another 2 levels (maybe there are even higher levels, idk).
To be fair to Georgians, this was Mikhail Saakashvili’s doing and in the first war of the early 1990’s over Abkhazia and Ossetia I don’t know what happened, so it’s possible they have a legitimate grievance to a degree.
The internal borders of the Soviet Union and SFRY were fundamentally bad for Russians and Serbs, hence why there is a relentless insistence upon them. This is not an accident.
There’s nothing inherently eternal, legitimate or moral about borders, no matter how much someone claims otherwise. Borders are a constantly changing thing and have never remained the same in the past, and won’t in the future either.
This was done because post-ww2 borders were made to be punitive towards Germany in particular. Nothing more.
All the international laws of that time period have been completely broken and violated from the 1990’s, starting with Yugoslavia. International law is overrated.
The Deep State, which can overrule some fatso casino OAP with trifling ease. It wouldn’t be concern for Armenia, but rather a concern that Turkey could get too much influence. They are still trying to force Turkey ditch the S400 and crawl back into the NATO fold. That requires leverage. A more prestigious Turkey is the opposite of that.
NK going to Azerbaijan would improve Turkey’s standing somewhat but it is Azerbaijan’s willingness to be Israel’s bitch in event of any war with Iran that is the crucial factor for the US Deep State here. And NK is an acceptable sacrificial goat for their submissive position. Swallowing Armenia would be disproportional to that greater objective. Why should Azerbaijan be given such a huge gift when they are already giving the US deep state what it wants? And that too by giving Turkey even more influence? That makes no sense from their PoV.
We need a “based” reaction. I’ve noticed this before. It’s like they all have hardcore autism to the point I believe it’s genetic, and mandatory to them. Constantly playing like they’re tough and hard but then they bitch and moan at the same time. I’ve tried to argue with some progressivoids and it has just convinced me even further to rebuild the iron curtain and flood the rest with the third worlders. Let God sort ’em out, when it all fails we’ll just colonize the place
Who can argue with this?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1322218253247303681
No tidal on there. It reduces the intermittency problems from 3-4 weeks to 6 hours in the UK.
Molten Salt Reactors will change the economics for nuclear. Consumption of existing waste even.
Across medieval Europe, towns were often full of foreigners. English in Ireland, Flemish in Wales and England and France. English in Angevin France. Jews and Italians dotted here and there. And as you say, Germans almost everywhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Generally they pursued trades at which the local community was less competent and were reliable as taxpayers.
Wow, you don’t say? Who could have thought!
The fact they haven’t done a census since 2002 is telling. It tells you censuses in the Balkans aren’t exactly reliable and I believe Vardar Macedonia is the last place for the Albanian/Muslim populations birthrates to fall below 2.1.
Anyway, Vardar Macedonia is a low strategic priority for Serbs (only around 50,000 Serbs territorially scattered I believe) and it’s hard to change anything, especially now that they were annexed into NATO this year.
Their “elites” most probably accepted this because they were threatened by the reactivation of Albanian separatists and hope that NATO membership will stop another attempt like the one in 2001 (seems naive).
The reality is that most Muslims already hate Serbs anyway regardless of what they do. Despite a few exceptions like Syrian/Arab nationalists and maybe some other Muslim religious minorities (Druze, Alawites, Alevis etc).
Take a look at what the Muslim world from Turkey to Malaysia did during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. They all supplied large amounts of money, supplies, weapons and Jihadists against Serbs (mostly through fake charities). Claims that there was an arms embargo on Croats and Muslims is complete garbage because it only existed as formal international law but was blatantly violated from the start to the finish of the wars (before they even attacked in the case of Croats). Ignore all the whitewashing and apologetics for Islamists in the links, of course …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_support_in_the_Bosnian_War#Support_to_Bosnian_Muslims
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_mujahideen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Muslim_Brigade
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/22/warcrimes.comment
http://www.parstimes.com/history/iran_bosnia.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/05/13/iran-ships-explosives-to-bosnian-muslims/0988537a-3dd6-47f4-9e94-dcfb457b846c/
Iran literally sent hundreds of IRGC, Quds Force and other specialists to Bosnia from start to finish (including Qasem Soleimani). Current Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah even claimed in an interview a few years ago that Hezbollah was in Bosnia and that Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups copied and plagiarized their flags and ideology from Hezbollah and the Shia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnia_and_Herzegovina%E2%80%93Iran_relations#Bosnian_War
https://mena-studies.org/irans-influence-in-bosnia-a-dagger-in-the-flank-of-europe/
There are still today a whole bunch of Jihadists and camps in the Federation (many of them in villages Serbs were expelled from including the infamous Gornja Maoca). There was also an attack on a Serb police station in Zvornik in Republika Srpska in 2015. This isn’t going into all the beheadings and other crimes they did against Serbs …
Attitudes towards Albanians are a bit different though because they’re considered somewhat less faithful to Islam and to a degree their Islam is more LARPing (their primitive Shiptar hyper-tribalism is the most important thing to them). At least Iran definitely thinks so because Albania harbors anti-Islamic Regime MEK rebels and is fully on board with the US-Israel agenda against Iran. Still, USA (scout drones), Germany (heavy weapons, tanks, infantry AT missiles, etc) and Turkey (light weaponry, officer training and other indirect assistance) are arming and equipping Albanians on Kosovo in all sorts of different ways currently.
“Western powers” since post-1945 and the 1990’s are not what they used to be in different centuries. Current “Western powers”, USA in particular, are run by Liberals and Zionists (you know what this really means) whose priorities are somewhat different from those of “Western powers” in the past.
There are many reasons why they did what they did, but the key ones are supporting Muslims against Christians to control Europe, punishing Serbs for daring to defy them, appeasing Muslims with Bosnia and Kosovo to distract and soften the blows of Israel blatantly screwing Muslims in the Middle East (this last one clearly has not worked), etc.
In all honesty though, Serbs made many serious strategic errors during the 1990’s (especially 1991-1995) and there was a missed window of opportunity for Serbs to decisively win against Muslims in Bosnia in the 2nd half of 1993 (Ejup Ganic, who organized attacks and did much to start war against Serbs publicly acknowledged that Bosniaks are in fact Serbs of the Muslim faith in this time period) and then manage Krajina much better without getting bombed and seriously pushed around by NATO. This is keeping in mind all the foreign pressure and the fact that Serbs were simply not ready as they had been very unpleasantly awakened from a coma of rule by Croats, Slovenes and “brotherhood and unity”.
Serbs were the majority of Bosnia’s population since the 7th century to WW2, as you correctly understand.
Serbs stopped being a majority in Bosnia post-1945 because of the slaughter of Serbs in Bosnia in WW2 (literally all the Serbs that live in Bosnia today either know or have deceased family/relatives that were murdered by Croat and Muslim Ustashe from WW2) but also because of very high Muslim birth rates post-1945 (compared to low Serb and Croat ones). They were so high that the number of Bosniaks grew despite the Bosnian War when they supposedly experienced “genocide” (yet another debunking of that claim).
It’s not a made up problem. It’s about maintaining and strengthening an Islamic state right next to the heart of Europe. Bosnia is literally only a few hundred kilometers away from Vienna.
“Europeans” clearly seem not to realize the implications of having a Muslim state with a subjugated Christian population (Serbs and Croats try to resist as much as they can) so close to the center of Europe. It’s like they’ve completely forgotten what went on when the Ottoman Empire owned Bosnia and Herzegovina, but explaining this to people who unironically believe in Serbs are bad narratives is a lost cause.
I personally think “Europeans” deserve to be wrecked by Muslims and other migrants because they hate Serbs so much (most of them).
The problem for Serbs is that ever since the Treaty of Dayton was signed in 1995 (the fact that Serbs even had to sign it to being with is problematic), it has been blatantly violated and broken to harm Serbs. This was deliberately intended because the US makers of Dayton had “the letter of Dayton” vs “the spirit of Dayton” in mind. They broke what they promised with Dayton before they even signed it (promise of 49% of Bosnia for Srpska, with territorial cut off of Brcko even though Serbs lead there, and the ceasefire for pre-negotiation to Dayton they broke for more Croat-Muslim territorial gains against Serbs).
60,000 US military soldiers directly occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1996-2006. They and other occupation forces systematically worked on disempowering Republika Srpska and handing over institutional competencies from it to the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the overall “Bosnian state”. Somewhere between 62-68 competencies (some of this includes literally stolen money in the form of “loans” from Srpska to the Federation) and institutional functions have been stolen from Republika Srpska since 1995.
They tellingly left when the plan to practically eliminate the Army of Republika Srpska and place it under the control of Bosniaks in 2006 was completed, to be followed by a slow motion plan to eliminate Republika Srpska, leaving it to exist in name only. Fortunately, this has failed and since 2012 slow and gradual efforts are being made to undo the elimination of Republika Srpska (pressure against it is far from over), and it now has stronger ties with Serbia than it ever had since it was founded in 1992.
Unfortunately, the present situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is such that Serbs have no choice but to ally with Bosnian Croats (they don’t either) because Muslims want a 100% unitary state with enslaved or gone non-believers (ignore all the Taqiyya and platitudes about “peace and reconciliation”, “Bosnian multiethnic democracy”, etc.) and they’re backed in this by many foreign powers. Croats are untrustworthy and I suspect they’ll weasel out at the first chance they’re offered to slaughter Serbs in combination with a bit of foreign pressure encouraging them to do so (like in 1994). Ideally in the future, Muslims and Croats will viciously murder each other while Serbs can just unite Srpska and Serbia and be done with war there (I suspect future war will be necessary unfortunately) when geopolitical circumstances improve.
Yes, Albanians (and Bosniaks) are nothing more than cannon fodder that have a ridiculously high opinion of themselves because they’re used to being artificially privileged by foreign empires.
Croats are literally like a combination of the worst in Germans and Jews. The ultimate purpose of their existence is to annihilate Serbs (on a tally of crimes against Serbs, Croat ones are by far the longest and largest). They’ve literally subverted, sabotaged and infiltrated Serbia and it’s institutions, economy, society, media and etc to an insane degree (a literal ethnic Croat led Serbia’s defense ministry from 2000-2012 and he deliberately almost completely destroyed the Serbian Army). They’re like a combination of a parasitic life form and a cancerous brain tumor. There’s still a long way to go before Serbia is free from Croat occupation and subversion.
There is also still a disturbing amount of Croatization of Serbs underway. The fake Montenegrin nation project is a Croat project to de-Serb Montenegro and Croatize that land. Vojvodina is also troublesome as well with its autonomy that is a Croat trick against Serbs.
On this note, the Serb Metropolitan Bishop of Montenegro just died yesterday (from coronavirus presumably, although given the politics, who knows). I just hope that he’s left this world having finished the worthwhile task of saving Serbs in Montenegro from being eliminated and reviving the Serb-ness of that land, despite the serious pressure to de-Serb it still underway, even with the setback against Milo Djukanovic recently.
Yep …
I suspect this is fake because Croatian history is one of the biggest jokes to ever exist in this world and their Medieval history is literally completely invented garbage. It should be left to better experts at debunking fake Croat Medieval history to check that.
This should really have OPEC and oil companies worried, once trucks start going electric, oil prices can only fall
I wonder who makes more profit from truck/SUV sales, the car companies or the oil companies
Slavs are no less susceptible to leftist propaganda than Western Europeans. The reason there’s no third worlders there is because they’re seen as poor shitholes, why would they go there when the borders of Western Europe are wide open? Don’t delude yourself that there’s fundamentally any other reason for it, they’re just not desirable countries for third worlders to go to compared to Western countries.
In my experience Poles and other Eastern Europeans go even more out of their way to insist they’re not racist than Western Europeans too, they seem like classic trad con religious cucks to me.
How much does energy storage cost? Pumped-storage hydroelectricity makes up for 95% of the worlds grid electricity storage and pumped storage stations aren’t cheap.
Do continue, Britbong.
This is your top “based” tabloid: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-8891233/Krasnodar-players-blasted-social-media-FOUR-took-knee-ahead-Chelsea-defeat.html
You are committing a categorization error.
Nonwhites in the West, by and large, vote along racial lines. >90% support for Leftward parties is not common, even when the Rightist parties are severely cucked. One cannot change their deep-seated, race-based motivations, when it comes to voting, though psychologically, independent of race, they surely span a spectrum of political values, and that is why it is easy to “sway” them – you are merely talking to the half that might have rightward sympathies.
The way that whites vote is more bifurcated, more a true division of Left and Right, and that is why it appears difficult to “sway” them.
They do (at least Poles do) while also instituting reasonable policies that keep their people safe like sending refugees, like that Chechen who beheaded the schoolteacher, to places who accept them like France.
Global warming will not benefit Russian agriculture in the short run, melted permafrost will turn water logged and unsuitable for settlement or cultivation, plus the soil of the taiga is not that fertile to start with.
Isnt the Daily Express comparatively the most “based” tabloid of the UK?
Georgia is a tiny, chaotic and weak, third world country, of 3,7 million living citizens, with little economy, and the majority of its small population in poverty. Nationalism in such countries is a comforting distraction for the people, but it’s a dangerous delusion when the leaders start to believe it.
One of the main skills you need from the leadership of the most weak, poor, micro-countries, is the ability to “stay in your lane”, “modesty”, “humbleness”, and building stable alliances with the neighbouring powerful countries, and prioritizing of economic over military dreams.
Wealthy, large and powerful countries powers like France, USA and UK, can mostly survive their current grandiose, narcissistic leaders; but the poor, small third world country like Georgia was lucky (and relied on generosity of its neighbours) to survive Saakashvili.
And now Armenia has – Pashinyan. Probably, at this instant, Odessa is preparing to invite Pashinyan to be its future governor.
https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/climate-change-map-thumbnail.jpg
https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/projected-impact-of-climate-change/image_print.jpg
https://static.themoscowtimes.com/image/1360/20/1b793463c5954bf18b1672183c61008b.jpg
https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/20191018_ES_THP_ClimateFacts_Figure_4.jpg
https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/20191018_ES_THP_ClimateFacts_Figure_3.jpg
Correct. Another short-term cost will be many buildings become unviable due to melted permafrost. But in the long-term, it will very obviously be a huge net benefit.
https://tompride.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/express1.jpg
Inveterate Scottish nationalist and legendary James Bond star Sean Connery died today. 🙁
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/BD29/production/_115152484_scpa.png
Coronapoasting is boring, but I still feel this chart says a lot.
https://i.imgur.com/34kJgM4.jpg
This is without any lockdowns + general failure to protect the elderly population.
I think COVID-19 will be much more remembered than past pandemics not because it is more dangerous but because the policy response was lunatic.
So, after a long battle, he finally succumbed to the the wounds that Steven Seagal gave him on the set of Never Say Never Again, in 1983.
A Tesla powerwall costs $6500, but the cost will fall as EVs become more popular, people are already using batteries from crashed EVs in solar systems
We have a large pumped storage station in Ireland, a while back I figured that it held about the same amount of energy as 6 thousand fully charged gen 1 Nissan Leafs
BTW, I think Connery was the best Bond because there is a subtle humor in Bond being hyper-masculine, and none of the other actors could really pull that off. Would it have been as funny to see Roger Moore, shackled to a table, sweating bullets as a laser beam slowly tracked up towards his crotch? And Connery could pull off a cold-blooded killer better too.
There was in an interesting Halloween conversation in the earlier Open Thread, but now it’s pushed too far down the forum. https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-124/#comments
AP was even starting to provide ghost stories.
If we’re allowed to continue from it.
What is “materialist”? We were talking about a lack of knowledge.
You can try to separate in the texts a historical Socrates, from the literary voice for Plato’s theories (and the latter enjoys listening to stories about Atlantis) – and it’s similar to what you can try with the historical Jesus, from the literary Jesus.
Socrates’ teaching seems to be skepticism. Socrates was the wisest man, because although he does not know the answers to the underlying questions (like all other humans who have ever existed) – he could sense the extent to which he does not know. “He knows only that he knows nothing.”
These drugs are not just “cutting inputs” (that would be a sensory deprivation tank, or simple meditation), but causing many changes in the brain. That’s not to say, you experience “real world” less when intoxicated with DMT, than when your blood is empty of the drug. The experiences are all products of a “real world”. But DMT has effected a co-ordination of consciousness and the organism’s senses, to become different from the way which is the habitual co-ordination that we have, because presumably the habitual orientation we have is the evolutionarily useful one to have.
What is “a materialist”?
–
In terms of psychedelic drugs – if we were psychologists studying DMT experiences, I believe from an ethical view we would try to choose for our participants who had not experienced any previous psychological issues. People with schizophrenia are correlated with organized religious people. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4031576 So it’s possible the sample of people it would be ethical to use to explore drugs like DMT, would be less religious, and this sample would have less adverse effects.
Cannabis is an incredibly mild drug by comparison – however, it is believed that in a small set of people (with certain genetic predisposition to mental illness), even cannabis can be harmful to such people’s symptoms. So for sample of drug experiences, less the “metaphysical” people will likely be the safer sample to use the drugs.
Point is, we can’t access the noumenal world. Everything we experience is mediated by our senses, or abstracted from them. However, this doesn’t necessarily imply that a noumenal world does not exist. To claim there is necessarily nothing beyond the consciousness of sentient beings – an example of hubris. “I can’t access the locked room; therefore it must not have anything inside”.
One way to test our beliefs: look at structure of our society in developed countries. We have government agencies for managing causally intercessionary threats that our society believes in, and yet there is not “FBI and IRS” for fighting against the causal intercession of demons. Similarly, look at the way you discuss causal processes of historical events.
No historian of First World War is publishing about the causal intercession of demons in Battle of Somme. When we discuss causation of important events like Battle of Somme, our society does not publish the influence of demons.
Again, we read in a biography of Beethoven – “Beethoven had many demons, which led him to drink” – the majority of readers immediately understand this sentence in a psychological sense, as referring to psychological problems, not the pet demons which he keeps in cage in his apartment and instruct him to buy beer. It’s perhaps possible that my greatgreatgreatgrandmother, would understand this sentence as implying a demon who you can observe with your senses (while your blood is empty of DMT).
But at least the 19th century for the literate European man, there is only one interpretation of the sentence. Pushkin, in 1820s, is already refers to his “demon”, as his youthful feeling of disillusionment.
“Manuscript Found in Saragossa” is published in 1815, and causally existing demons are already described in a folkloric way of lost romantic centuries. So it’s the beginning of the 19th century, and the literate population already describes these beliefs like a romantic feature of the past.
I had a similar kind of “ghost experience” as a child. But when I was older I discovered the reason for it (a mechanism of the window). We underestimate how active our minds are (and probably we are evolved to overestimate the activity of objects, and small noises – particularly at night, when the feeling of fear and hypervigilance to sound, saved our ancestors’ from being killed many times).
At another time, when I was a teenage, I slept during vacation as a guest for some days in the room of a child who had died a decade earlier. I certainly found (and find the memory) of this creepy and making the hair stand up – not because of ghost, but because of the connection to real events: the tragedy of that child’s life is no fiction.
IMHO, France has already accepted enough such refugees. Resettling them in peaceful Muslim countries might be better, don’t you think?
Why exactly is it Germany’s business to object to a Serbia-Kosovo land swap?
Yep; George Floyd’s death and the subsequent resulting riots resulted in Russotriumphialism in regards to this!
Good piece on the country that has served as a kind of big brother to Hrvatska:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/10/30/berlin-newest-drang-nach-osten-started-in-1990s-with-serbs/
Different age groups seem to have differing views on the best Bond. I agree with your assessment. Roger Moore IMO is number two.
The aforementioned age matter pertains to a number of other issues like all sports radio stations choosing hosts.
This piece reminds me of the two Russian dudes, who among other things cranked Adam Schiff:
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/10/31/who-sacha-baron-cohen-hollywood-comic-genius-or-one-man-anti-republican-hit-squad/
Human’s technology for killing each other, has been usually the most effective and fast to progress form of technology.
Observers of the battles of the First World War, were shocked and unadapted to how easily and effectively thousands of soldiers could be killed by artillery and machine guns.
Watching the video even last year, of the shooting of people in a Mosque in New Zealand, rifle technology of the mid-20th century, still appears almost like “evil magic” to my eyes, to the extent the video seems almost a hoax – that the murderer could kill dozens of people in a few seconds, and with no effort or skill.
From the drone videos, you feel a sensation that it is now easier to kill each other from the screen, than to play many video games. Moreover, it seems that psychology of ordinary soldiers is still more unadapted and unaware for the 21st century battlefield than it was for the 20th century one.
In last video uploaded by Azerbaijan, Armenian soldiers are still acting as if they are unaware that the danger is above them, and the difficulty level for the drone operators for final attack would be perhaps considered unrealistically easy if it was in a video game.
I think they havent done census in Vardar Macedonia since then because they fear that it shows that Muslims are going soon to be a majority, so they just pretend that everything is okay, little bit same as Ukrainians with their census that somehow is every year moved to the next year, although they have different reasons for it.
I know that Muslim ummah helped Bosniaks a lot, so not a new thing for me.
Also I follow the situation in Montenegro, yes whole country is a sham.
But thanks for the rest, it was very informative. So the Bosniaks are serious followers of Islam? I always thought that they are like Pomaks and turks of Bulgaria, and dont take it as seriously as the Arabs do.
They definitely were then a part of the kingdom of Hungary, which was attacked and badly ravaged by the Mongols. At least the non coastal areas of the modern Croatia were under Hungarian rule then.
We’ll have to wait till 2032 to see if that’s true. 🙂
You also have this classic
https://www.nationalists.org/library/hitler/daily-express/judea-declares-war-on-germany.png
Poland, huh. We have massive protests following Constitutional Court ruling restricting abortion rights. 300 deaths a day and huge number of cases already. In two weeks the shitty situation will be made into nightmarish.
Seems CV19 will claim more victims in Poland than HK flu 1968 pandemics (at most 25k).
It could be. 🙂
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn%3AANd9GcTCUwtCndfq-UmNFeq36qGgA-C1i8gGN1jikg&usqp.jpg
I know this. I was writing about a near death experience. When you will die, your sensory inputs will start to shut down, but the functioning of the CNS will not end immediately. Quite the opposite: as the neurons experience stress linked to a physiological collapse in metabolism, they will most probably fire the neurotransmitters, which will end up mainly degraded into bufotenine and DMT. Our organism naturally produces both bufotenine and DMT as the end product of the tryptamine neurotransmitter catabolism.
But you are wrong if you think that DMT is merely a hallucinogen comparable to psilocybin or to a lesser degree the LSD, which distorts the sensory inputs. DMT reorganizes the functionning of the SNC to such a degree that what you see, hear and feel is no longer correlated to what is to be found around you in the physical world. The experience is described as very similar to a dream in which you see a completely different world.
This is of course normal, given that our organism naturally produces small amounts of bufotenin and DMT while it recycles the tryptamine neurotransmitters during sleep. IMHO that is the main reason that we see dreams. During the near death experience, the dream becomes the real thing from which there is no escape if someone is not reanimated and brought back to the normal biological functioning of the organism.
People on DMT trips describe “other worlds” and “alien beings “, communication with demonic and angelic creatures, “cosmic landscapes” etc. These things are absolutely real for the people who experience them. They appear as real as the normal world we experience on a daily basis.
Therefore our consciousness is capable of experiencing “other worlds ” that are populated with a whole bestiary of different “agents ” including “demons “. While becoming inescapable during a DMT or bufotenin trip, these “psychological agents” are probably also present subconsciously during our normal waking life. It is not just emotional states, but psychological agents or mind parasites.
Collin Wilson had written an interesting fiction novel about this topic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind_Parasites
Nick Land seems having independently come to similar conclusions as Wilson.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fanged-noumena
When one of these “mind parasites” imposes itself on the consciousness of a human being you have what is called a psychosis nowadays and was called demonic possession before humans invented psychology. But even if these psychological agents to not outright take control, they can still influence our behavior and have an impact on our interactions with other people. I am convinced that many serial killers were in fact driven by such “mind parasite” psychological agents. As were people like Lenin and Hitler etc.
A person who believes that the whole of the Reality is only made of material elements (atoms and subatomic particles) and different states and combinations thereof. That there is nothing that can be found beyond this material Universe.
This is impossible to prove or disprove. This is something we cannot discuss in any meaningful manner. It has to be attempted with every fiber of our being before it is concluded as impossible. I don’t think you and I have done all we could to reach the noumenal Reality. We both haven’t done enough, comfortable as we both are in our petit bourgeois slumber. Talk is cheap. Death will awaken us.
Sounds like you are talking about Indians instead.
Slavs are not street shitters. Sorry
I recommend Lovecraft’s story Pickman’s Model, if you have not read it.
For ghost stories, the three favorite off the top of my head:
–What is it? A Mystery, by Fitz James O’Brien
–The Phantom Coach, by Amelia B. Edwards
–The Monkey’s Paw, by W. W. Jacobs
Incidentally, I think the Metro books did a good job of creating Lovecraftian monsters.
Hindu is a cognate of Wend or Vened or Anty. Genetically speaking the higher caste people in Northern India are still mainly Y haplogroup R1a. Gautama Siddhartha has been described as “blue eyed and golden hued” in the earliest Buddhist scriptures. Of course nowadays the majority of Hindustani population is so much admixed with the Dravidian and Sino-Burmese ethnic groups that any meaningful comparison of Indians and Slavs is impossible. Nevertheless, 3000 years ago things were quite different and the mythical Bharat could probably have mixed with today’s Russians without being recognized as foreigners.
http://mrxxi.narod.ru/budogosch/LIB/jarnikova.html
Yes, Moore is my #2. I think Pierce Brosnan was chosen as a kind of substitute for Roger Moore. They both starred in a TV show where they gave off a gentlemanly vibe. The Saint for Moore. Remington Steele for Brosnan.
The worst Bond is either Craig or Lazenby, IMO. Craig lacks charm. Lazenby lacked the accent, which was really essential.
.
I’m not sure. Sometimes one sees “Slavic” faces among Indians, such that they could be Slavs if one only photoshopped their skin and hair tones. Though this is more common among northwestern peoples such as Pashtuns, like this guy from Afghanistan:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fc/9f/5f/fc9f5f948a966c4dd6423b0a59c9b766.jpg
Not many, all of the buildings, and roads, railroads, ports, oil and gas pipelines and installations. The whole infrastructure built in Soviet times in the far north is sinking into swamps and needs to be rebuilt for new conditions of “tropical Hyperborea”.
https://cleantechnica.com/2020/06/09/melting-permafrost-claims-its-first-major-victim-russias-oil-gas-network/
The author of “Manuscript Found in Saragossa” used a silver bullet to kill himself. Perhaps his belief in demons was real.
These were students at arguably the best Soviet university, not children. They heard footsteps going from room to room, not simply some banging. There were other witnesses also. There was no other explanation.
I’ll tell the one other ghost story I was told by someone who experienced it. They moved to a flat where the lights would be turned off and on in different rooms. Once the keys were placed in a strange location. They asked the landlord – “who died here?” The response was “who told you about that? How did you know?”
Of course one could pretend away such experiences, “probability,” strange electrical events, or whatever.
Our host asked on his twitter what would be the best practical ways of raising birth rate.
Other than these than actually work IRL, like generous Scandinavian style maternity leave and child care provisions and generous Israeli style handouts for super breeding religous sects.
https://twitter.com/akarlin88/status/1322496451403022336
If you needed to know, Mussolini style childless tax is not one of them, it was as succesful as other Il Duce’s great ideas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Italy#Vital_statistics_since_1900
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1556-5823.2010.00002.x
https://sci-hub.do/10.1111/j.1556-5823.2010.00002.x
Battle for Births: The Fascist Pronatalist Campaign in Italy 1925 to 1938
The battle for births took place during the inter‐war years of 1925 to 1938. The demographic campaign promoted fecunditá, especially within the working class, by increasing welfare benefits, legislating tax breaks, making available better health care, and awarding highly public medals and recognition to those women who produced more than the state’s target of five children per family. The regime associated motherhood, children, family, and virility with maintaining national greatness. In spite of all the mass propaganda, mobilization, and state incentives to increase the birthrate, the battle for births had failed by 1938.
As usual, the twitter alt-right overlooked the “practical, now and here” part and unleashed their fantasies about putting women in cages and remaking Earth into planet Gor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorean_subculture
Example #1214965 why alt-right is completely useless.
Can this blog do better?
60k dead by the end of January w/o countermeasures according to U. of Washington.
http://bharatiya.ru/istoki.html
Be like Herakles!
https://www.instagram.com/p/Br5_rdDBFqm/
ਦਸਰੁਦ੍ਰਪਾਛੇਭਏਹਨੂਇਕਾਦਸਜਾਨ॥ਤਿਉਪੀਛੇਦਸਗੁਰਨਤੇਸਿਖਜਾਨੁਹਨਮਾਨ॥
After the ten avatars of Rudra, the eleventh avatar is Hanuman. In the same manner, after the Ten Gurus, recognize the eleventh [Guru], the Sikh Panth, as Hanuman-like. .
ਜੇਤਾਬਲਹਨਵੰਤਮੈਸੁਈਪੰਥਕੇਮਾਹਿ॥ਕਵਿਕੰਕਨਬੀਚਾਰਕਹੁਯਾਮੈਸੰਕਾਨਾਹਿ॥
That great strength that Hanuman has, that strength is within the Khalsa. The Poet Kankan reflects upon this with no doubt in his mind. .
.
ਦਸ ਗੁਰ ਕਥਾ, ਕ੍ਰਿਤ: ਕਵੀ ਕੰਕਨ
Das Gur Katha, author: Poet Kankan (poet of Guru Gobind Singh), 232-33
Some say there is a connection between the two people’s dating back to the Aryan invasion of the subcontinent…
https://melmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/slavsquat-1.jpg
Why would they go to the effort of intervening when nothing they care about is at stake? They would have to escalate the stick used on Turkey, since, as you say, their previous attempts to prevent Turkey from acquiring the S400 have been unsuccessful.
That’s interesting. I googled for few minutes, but I found only some US-related links. Got a link to share?
Hindu is an exonym, in Persian language the Indus river was called by the name of Hindu, which then was appropriated by the Muslims, and before the Indian independence it was common to call all people of the subcontinent by the name of the Hindu, no matter if one was a Muslim or “Hindu.” Even the Mughals called their land Hindustan. Yes ancient Persian is close relative of Sanskrit, in Sanskrit Sindhu just means river, so the Punjab of ancient times was known by the name Sapta Sindhu, Seven Rivers and as we know, the biggest river of the Punjab is Indus.
Bharata is name taken from the Puranas. Its not of Vedic origin. Puranic literature is much newer than the holy Vedas and sadly are in practice much more important for the modern Hinduism than the Vedas. Nowadays there is a growing consensus among the Indologists that Puranas or themes preserved in the Puranic literature, and the Puranic gods are very likely continuation of the pre-Aryan invasion native Indian traditions. Mahabharata and Ramayana are also completely Puranic inventions and no way based in the Vedas.
In the holy Vedas the lands of the Aryans are called by the name of the Aryavarta, which is cognate of Avestan Airyanem Vaejah, meaning the expanse of the Aryans.
Even the Vedas itself have not been left untouched, Buddha himself refers only to three Vedas, also early Buddhist literature recognised only three, not four like modern Indians, its also consensus in the modern Indology that the fourth Veda book the Atharva Veda is a later addition.
Major and minor marks of Buddhas body is a suprisingly large topic in Buddhist literature. He has perfectly white teeth, broad shoulders like a lion, wide forehead with well defined hairline, spotless skin, and so on and so on….
R1a haplogroup is still quite common in Northern India, especially among the upper castes and Punjabis!
Indians outside the Assam, Northeast and the remotest areas of Himalaya have quite little East Asian admixture, Nepal is a different case.
Well yes, it was basically a comment on the Polish obsession with the abortion question.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/what-the-nordics-get-right/
I’m still scratching my head over Karlin’s recent quip that he didn’t think that “you were still a very deep thinker”? He needs to finally show us his stuff and put out that “Bifurcation” piece that he’s been mumbling about for over the last half of a year. 🙂
Yes, as with any recessive phenotype you have recessive back cross combinations reappearing among the admixed population. This probably happens most often in the North of the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
You can also find the same thing happening among the Algerian Berbers asmixed with the Vandals, Alans and of course Roman settlers, Kurds who are descended from Eastern Iranian tribes through an admixture with Caucasus and Middle Eastern ethnic groups, and even among the Middle Eastern Arabs (particularly Syrians) who have incorporated some Hittite genetics. Basher Al Assad is a fine example of such a back cross phenomenon: tall, dolichocephalic and blue eyed.
But the recent paleogenetics studies of the Indus civilization and the BAMAC have shown that the native populations in these areas was probably a mix of “Anatolian “, “Middle Eastern ” and “Dravidian” genetic lineages.
Already in the earliest Vedic tradition, Agni (cognate of the Slavic Ogon’) burns the cities of the dark skinned Das-yu. Dasa later acquired the meaning of slave, servant. The further South and the darker the dwellers of the Hindustan become. Also the lower the caste, the darker the skin. And the word for caste is varna: color/tribe.
Your steadfastness in pursuing the validity of ghosts seems to indicate that you have personally experienced this phenomena?…
Albinos from India and Sri Lanka:
https://img.izismile.com/img/img5/20120315/640/the_largest_albino_family_in_the_world_640_16.jpg
https://c8.alamy.com/comp/M3NPG9/albino-man-indian-hindu-blonde-white-parade-matale-sri-lanka-M3NPG9.jpg
https://img.izismile.com/img/img5/20120315/640/the_largest_albino_family_in_the_world_640_09.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/03/07/article-2111298-120DB025000005DC-167_634x424.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/03/07/article-2111298-120DAFA6000005DC-363_634x798.jpg
https://dz01iyojmxk8t.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/06033800/Children-of-the-Moon_SwatiVerma-6-copy.jpg
I wonder if a majority of Westerners could even manage to use squat toilets of the variety common in the Third World, could Donald Trump for example manage to squat for 5 minutes (or for however long he needs to do his business)?
Must be good leg excercise for sure.
If you don’t mind me asking, what is your ethnic background? You are very knowledgeable about these things.
Yes. I usually get along very well with Hindustani people. And I have a healthy dose of respect for the Sikhs. The majority of them are hard working, disciplined and honest people. I wish modern day Slavs had more of that Kshatrya spirit.
BTW, I have never actually wanted to insult you, but sometimes the ganjubas ashva seems to be galloping and taking you to different kinds of funny places. That’s why I sometimes had some ironic comments while replying to your posts. If you felt a lack of respect, then I apologize.
Interestingly enough, the earliest use of cannabis is recorded in the Tianshan Scythian cultural background. The most primitive and sturdy variety of cannabis (the Ruderalis subspecies) is found between the Volga and southern Siberia. The Chuya valley in Kazakhstan that has been the dwelling of Saka people for two thousand years is home to an endemic wild population of relatively high THC cannabis plants. Everywhere Atyans went they took ganja with them.
Finally among the different names that cannabis has received around the world; ganja, ganjubas, qannab a.s.o, the Russian konoplya is AFAIK the only one that has an understandable etymology.
Kon’ (male horse) + palit’ (to put fire to) = konoplya. The weed that burns the horses…
Thank God, I have not. That would be disturbing.
But such encounters are much more common than those involving demons, making the denial of them sillier.
The word kon supposedly has an Iranic root, so konopli are linked to Scythians?
I once experienced demon possession within a good friend of mine, who had a lifelong addiction to “konopli”. It was indeed a very disturbing experience for me. Towards the end of his life, he would go into these trance like states of mind muttering incoherent words that were impossible to understand.
Others in our circle of friends would complain about this new habit of his. Once, while leaving his home, he thwarted my exit and started mumbling this gibberish while deeply looking into my eyes. It felt very “wicked” to me and I didn’t return to visit him for several months after that. Thankfully, there was never a repeat performance of this behavior.
The last time the Sahara was warmer than now, about 6000 years ago, the Sahara was a Savannah. Greenland grew grain in the Medieval Warm Period and Timbuktu prospered. Polar bears survivied. These maps are tosh.
I am ancient and I rate Brosnan. More authentic than Connery who was always hamming it.
They sink into the ground in the Volga Region because the Soviet Union didn’t pay much attention to building foundations.
It was a time when the Christian religion mattered more, than the religion of the flag.
‘No Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities,’ SpaceX claims.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/elon-musk-spacex-mars-laws-starlink-b1396023.html
https://covid19.healthdata.org/poland?view=total-deaths&tab=trend
It seems they have not updated their forecast since Oct 26.
Note that the three ‘strategies’ begin to diverge on Nov 15. In three weeks (Nov 21) there will be 9,500 deaths regardless of what the government do tomorrow. If they decide on lockdown following France and UK (which they should imo) the effect on death data will show after three weeks.
IMO their forecast is too optimistic. Look at Daily Deaths graph and it show 200 deaths on Nov. 15 while the daily death in Poland already oscillates around 300 in last few days. Once they update their model the prediction will be worse.
My take: Regardless how dysfunctional and inept Poland’s gov is I am sure they had their own modeling and they knew in September where they were heading and yet they haven’t done anything except for building field hospitals. This indicates to me that they do not want to go in to a lockdown and will try to follow the Swedish path. Do they realize that Poland has much higher population density, much worse apartment base (people per apartment) and worse medical care system than Sweden so that the scaling 6,000 of Swedish deaths by population to the total of 24,000 in Poland is a lower bound only? Furthermore do they realize that Sweden most likely was doing a creative accounting and data reporting.
Imo, they should go to lockdown now (also for political reasons to shut down the feminist protests) for four weeks and then get into strict contact tracing and individual quarantining and universal masking strictly enforced. Unfortunately the fifth column of the rightoids in Poland did a pretty good job of undermining people’s trust into the official narrative about the pandemic. I am sure the disinformation outfits in Moscow and Beijing are very pleased with your Konfederacja and comrade Braun.
Poland and Czech Republic fucked up big time. They went through the first wave so well because they reacted early when they had very low infection rate. And Czechs were great on masking which was a grass root movement going against initial gov recommendations. And then instead of following through they began to celebrate whole summer and kept padding themselves on the back for their success. Pride goeth before a fall.
“Other than these than actually work IRL, like generous Scandinavian style maternity leave and child care provisions”
Norwegian TFR has plummeted recently 🙁
2009 – 1,98
2013 – 1,78
2019 – 1,53
All is not good in ‘paradise’.
Bharatas are a Vedic tribe meaning the cherished.
Various clans such as Puru, and Bharatas merged to form our glorious Kuru Panchal.
Samrat Bharat’s original name is Sarv Daman or subduer of all
Who cares about modern Indology?
https://twitter.com/Khalsa_Ak47/status/1318840714961309697?s=20
Read Bodh Avatar linked below.
https://www.searchgurbani.com/dasam-granth/page/993
Read Bodh Avatar
https://twitter.com/Ivan_Is_Back/status/1322664233423773699?s=20
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/623379992138481675/772240172565790720/unknown.png
Zindagi tou Vadh Ke Sanoo
Harimandir Pyaraa Ni
5000 Sadhus killed by Indira on Gopastami year 2023 Bikrami
avenged by Khalsa on Gopastami year 2041 Bikrami
Harimandir Sahib avenged after 153 days by Khalsa after each of the 5 attacks.
https://www.sikh24.com/2014/02/15/darbar-sahib-attacks-a-historical-perspective/
All the white countries (sole exception: remote island of New Zealand) have shown themselves to be unable to seriously commit to suppressing the virus.
So, bearing in mind that lack of long-term commitment, including white countries’ bizarre aversion to centralized quarantine, from that perspective, hard suppression in V4 was really a mistake, would have been more efficient to to keep new infections humming at a constant rate, like the US, instead of having the spike they’re not experiencing.
LOL. The cope is off the charts. You are the mirror image of the MAGA chuds blaming it on China.
I couldn’t agree with you more. Even had Ukraine gone on to become a member state of the EU, so what? It could have even paid economicdividend to Russia that had a lot of business interests in Ukraine, and could have found favorable means to avoid some taxes in the process (I remember reading about this somewhere back then, and it made sense). Russia could have sat on the fence and used its enormous soft power in Ukraine and again bring Ukraine “back into the fold”. But now, how likely is that to be?
Your views were well supported and Karlin just thru this one out there, knowing your humble character (it was unwarranted). I really didn’t know that you now live “somewhere in the west” and I’m not going to ask you where you live, however, since getting to know you better, I’ve often wondered what kind of work you’re involved with? If you feel uncomfortable expressing this, I’ll understand…
Believe me, Mr Hack, the immense majority of Russians were absolutely uninterested in the Ukrainian affairs prior to 2013. Even people like me who had distant relatives in Ukraine. The economic integration between EU and Ukraine also did not cause any emotional stress in the Russian population. We just didn’t care: Ukraine was independent for nearly a generation, they had their problems there and it was their own business.
The Russian ruling elites on the other hand were alarmed by the prospect. They had their reasons, and I suspect that the gas pipelines, the Crimean military bases and the MIC collaboration between Russian and Ukrainian Soviet era industrial clusters were the main reasons why Putin and his circle were worried. That were probably also the main reasons (along with the prospect of bringing in millions of zarobitchaney and the rich Ukrainian agricultural lands) that pushed the EU to pursue the potential association.
USA did not want to allow Ukraine to remain in the Russian sphere of influence, but it did not either want the EU to get such an interesting asset and become even more competitive compared to American industries. Remember Victoria Nuland’s “f☆ck Europe ” moment, that was exactly what Maidan was all about: create a long lasting problem for EU as well as Russia.
USA has succeeded in getting exactly what they wanted. Russia, EU and of course especially Ukraine have paid and still continue paying for the dim witted policies of their ruling elites.
The people of Russia and Ukraine have been stirred against each other by irresponsible propaganda and sometimes come to see each other as a kind of “hereditary enemy “, in the wicked and vile Serbo-Croat fashion. This isn’t good for any of the two Eastern Slavic nations.
I truly hope this all bloody nonsense will end as soon as possible. It is time to bury the hatchet and heal the wounds.
I agree with most of your ideas here, especially the sentiment expressed. I don’t think, however, that the violence perpetrated on Ukraine from the Russian side was the result of much pragmatic thought. The gas pipelines were in no danger of being damaged; Russian military bases in Crimea were secure for 40 years, the result of recent negotiations. Neither NATO nor the Ukrainian population was in any hurry to solidify any relationship at that time.
No, unfortunately, I think that more than anything it was Putin’s ego that was the driving force for these unfriendly advances into Ukrainian territory. I think that he just couldn’t stomach the idea that the majority of Ukrainians were just more interested in deepening their relationship with Europe, rather than get more involved with his Eurasian Union. It’s quite clear that had Putin not given the aggressive orders to invade Ukraine, we wouldn’t even be talking about all of this today.
V4’s early response was very good. However they should have followed it with efficient tracking and isolating local clusters in combination with universal masking. With very low infection rate in June they could make the tracking inexpensive very effective. Then they could have kept the epidemic humming on the low level unlike the US which has high level spread. Instead in summer they seemed to forgot that the epidemic was among them. This was combined with the wide spread anti-covid and anti-masking campaigning and activisms backed by the ammo provided by writings and youtube interviews of various German professors (*) who claimed (1) virus does not exist, (2) tests are fake, (3) this is just a flu, (4) masks are killing and emasculating you and other libertarian claptrap and (5) this is plandemia and other paranoid NWO end of times doomsday ideations. This disinformation campaign lead to keeping the West in the unresolved state what you yourself once called very aptly an idiot’s limbo.
That Moscow and Beijing must be experiencing lots of Schadenfreude observing how the West copes should be self-evident. Do they actively help to spread disinformation to make fighting the epidemic more difficult by inciting populations against concerted actions that could work? I have no proof but I respect Russia and China as the enemies of the West and thus suspect them of the worst.
(*) The star of ‘the HIV is Amercan virus’ KGB campaign was DDR professor Jakob Segal
Operation INFEKTION
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
US was the main beneficiary of the whole clusterf☆ck in the Eastern Ukraine. Putin reacted without analyzing the long term consequences. It’s that or perhaps he is simply not working in the Russian best interests.
I’m skeptical about Thulean Friend data.
Brosnan looked the part, but he’s a stiff. Too wooden and lacks charisma.
Connery did tend to ham it up, but given the special effects available in those early Bond films, it was understandable. It’s hard to take yourself too seriously with the cheesy special effects and film sets that were used at the time. It was bound to be campy to a degree.
It was only really during Brosnan’s era where the effects and set designs were good enough that you could play the Bond role totally straight.
Poland’s recent abortion mania isn’t about raising the TFR and anyone who thinks that is just displaying their ignorance. It’s just the personal religious obsession of a dying, obese crank who doesn’t have the rest of the country with him.
Money is a better motivator than abortion banning but it is still quite weak. The only country that has high TFR and is developed is Israel AFAIK and that is largely driven by a very high religious fervor. Even the seculars in Israel are enmeshed in their religion and have high TFR. It “rubs off”. There’s also a very nationalist element (“we have to outbreed the arabs”) which is spoken about very frankly.
Golda Meir openly said that she fears the ‘arab womb’ in the 1970s – and this was a labour politician! So, I ultimately come down on “it’s the culture, stupid” as the decisive factor. Not money.
All EE countries are deeply irreligious in terms of intensity. Religion, as I’ve observed before, is basically a form of national identity for countries that are largely still monoracial. So for Serbs it will be Orthodox, for Poles Catholicism etc. Russia has seen a superficial rise in religiosity, but if you look at church visits or fertility it’s still bottom-barrel. More bark than bite. Countries that are either more atheist (Czechia) or more religiously mixed (Hungary) tend to be more nationalist. But their TFR is still way below replacement because they don’t have the religious fervor.
The US had a TFR of 3+ even as late as the 1960s, which is pretty insane if you think about it. The US was a genuinely very religious country back then, but their religiousity was never nationalist per se as in Israel, but rather cosmopolitan which is inevitable if you are Christian. The dual trends of secularisation and liberalisation combined to force it down.
It’d be interesting to observe Indian TFR trends henceforth precisely because Hinduism isn’t evangelical like Christianity but it is also pretty liberal. If you look at their demographic situation, it resembles that of Israel a lot. You’re starting to see the same bunker mentality emerge. OTOH, overpopulation in India is taken as a given, even senior BJP leaders (including Modi himself) talk about it. That kind of emphasis would first have to change in order for India to see a sustained fertility boost.
Germany is the single largest EU member in territorial size, but even more importantly in population and economic power. In other words, this means that Germany is the most important EU member and its will is mostly the will of the whole EU (besides a few exceptions and cases of dissent recently). Fortunately, their economy seems to be struggling now with Corona and they’re becoming increasingly more irrelevant the more non-European mass immigration they take in (still needs more time to fully take effect).
Serbia-Kosovo negotiations are tied to the prospect of Serbia becoming a future EU member (in other words, Serbia’s potential future EU membership is conditioned on recognizing Kosovo), so this is why Germany has a formal right to concern itself with the process.
The problem for Serbia is that Germany has a very large amount of leverage because Germany is one of Serbia’s largest trade partners and has a large amount of Serb diaspora, so it’s hard for Serbia to directly defy Germany (Before Corona they were threatening sanctions and ultimatums against Serbia for refusing to recognize Kosovo). Germany does all sorts of malevolent things like finance separatism in Vojvodina, their diplomats give relentless lectures about “Serb crimes and atrocities against Albanians and others in 1990’s” (Germany’s UN ambassador did this just the other day recently), they finance Liberal NGO’s that insult and provoke ethnic Serbs in Serbia, etc.
Also, it’s possible that Vucic’s land swap proposal was a bargaining ploy and a tactic to stall for time and sabotage the process of Serbia’s “European integration” by having a somewhat legitimate pretext (in the eyes of others) to not recognize Kosovo. If so, the malevolence of Merkel and Germany has played quite well into this, at least for now.
Its not so much my ethnic background, but my religion and that I have lived and travelled in india quite a lot. Mostly its because of my religion, but although I seem konwledgeable its nothing compared to Tibetan Geshes. Geshe, Sanskrit Kalyanamitra, is a degree of doctor in those Buddhist monasteries who still follow the curriculum of ancient Indian monastic universities like Nalanda and Taxila. Yes Geshes they really know this stuff and they normally do not have emotional, devotional or religious attachments hindering their quest for knowledge, unlike many modern Indians who are so full of Bhakti or highly sentimental and devotional attitude towards philosophical and historical questions, and not forgetting Hindu nationalism, which sometimes can be catastrophic for ones reason. Many Indians literally believe that some of their holy cities or temples are millions years of old, and most believe that the Aryan invasion “theory” is just colonial propaganda and that the Aryans were native to India and later spread from India to Europe, but all people have some faults, and these are very small when in comparison to the good qualities of Indians and Indian nation, like hospitality, spirituality and friendliness. But theres a rational reason for Bhakti attitude after all, only a highly emotionally charged religion could save the Indian culture under the harsh and long years of Muslim rule. When Muslims practically destroyed all Buddhist monastic universities and all Hindu temples of Northern India, except some in remote Himalayas. How many times I have seen ruins of temples where all the heads of Buddha statues have been smashed, all frescoes spoiled….
Even nowadays it can be seen that the Southern India which had only 500-300 years of Muslim rule, seems much healthier, organized and developed than the Northern India, although before Islam Northern India was the most prosperous part of India. Anglos often or actually always forget that they came just when Indians were successfully liberating themselves of Muslim rule after 50-100 years of rebelling and fighting,
In the beginning of the Anglo rule, after the Maratha wars, the East India company even claimed ruling in behalf of Muslim Mughal emperor and that they were just stopping instability and revolts against his Muslim majesty. This state of affairs only ended in 1858 after the Great Indian Rebellion. Actually the poorest part of the of the poor North India are those were British ruled the longest, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, I think thats odd. No I dont think that Anglos were exceptionally cruel and evil colonial overlords, that is humbug! But they had for a long time very strictly Businesslike and pragmatic attitude regarding colonies, which propably had a bad effect on a local culture. Those Indians who could maximise the tax income of the lands, mostly Muslims, would get those lands, or at least in Bengal, Assam and Orissa there was that kind of system. Zamindar system it was called and actually it was originally established by the Muslims but the Brits perfected it. Think if nowadays government would sell rights for tax collecting.
Posession is much more common than you think. Technically, any person with addictions is posessed. (This includes cigarettes and pornography too.)
We live in a world molded in hell’s image in the quite literal sense.
Let’s agree to disagree.
I don’t think much of anything has changed in Georgia since the 2008 war ended and when Saakashvili left, although I could be wrong.
Lol.
I’m a bit more optimistic about Armenia and Pashinyan than you seem to be. At least its definitely clear that Pashinyan has done a much better job than Sakashvili as he’s lasted for at least a whole month in a war (although this war is of a different nature). I don’t think it’s possible for any politician in Eurasia to stoop lower than Saakashvili though (maybe Serbia’s political elite from 2000-2012?).
I also don’t think this is really an option for Pashinyan because he seems to struggle to speak Russian properly.
The term “anti-white” really means “anti-Anglo”. The Anglosphere is the only place that white people are hated and antagonised against simply for being white.
Obviously non-Anglo white countries do have their own problems with non-whites, most notably France and it’s Muslim population, but that’s a cultural/religious conflict, nothing to do with the fact that native French people are white.
This phenomena of being despised simply for being ethnically white/European seems to exist purely in the Anglosphere, mostly the US, UK, Canada and Australia particularly.
So when people speak of “anti-whiteness” I think they’re missing the point because what it really means is “anti-Anglo”. Other whites don’t experience this purely on account of their race in their own countries.
Sweden has been shown all the James Bond movies over the summer, so I’ve had a chance to catch up,
My considered opinion is that Connery did the best job, but Roger Moore also had his moments. It was Moonraker that swung it all towards utter silliness, I think. Rewatching the movies raised my opinion of Sir Rog, though. Also, the various underwater bases and volcanic lairs lend the movies a strangeness that I now and then find stylish rather than kitschy.
Lazenby … I’ll skip that one. He didn’t quite look the part, too much of a big bruiser. And the movie was something else, especially Woody Allen.
Timothy Dalton was actually underrated, but the movies suffered from being a bit too realistic at times, and of course from putting in the insufferable M played by Judi Dench. Perhaps the semi-realism was an overreaction to the previous era.
I thought Brosnan looked the part but was, as someone wrote here, a bit too wooden. He also suffered from yet another bout of idiotic movie making from the producers. Super villain Rupert Murdoch against ole Chinese gal! Asian becomes white through surgery (or something like that, I didn’t keep track)! Invisible cars! Relentless brand advertising!
Daniel Craig has been pretty good but now towards the end it all seems to spiral into basic US soap opera. There is some uninteresting ‘arc’ connecting the movies. Oh no, Bond and Blofeld are secretly brothers! etc. Is there a hint of Austin Powers in the air?
The most recent one, Spectre, was on telly just yesterday. It was a fairly slick production but ultimately soulless. The script was pedestrian and the directing basically done by numbers. However, it was at least sort of funny that the Bond girl side kick, with the proustian name Madeleine Swann, this time was Lea Seydoux, who at IMDB is still best known for her lesbian porno Blue is the warmest color. “Does my face smell like fish, James? Because it really should.”
Keep in mind that Albanians have been hijacking and grabbing large amounts of power for an ethnic minority since the Treaty of Ohrid in 2001 in the Vardar valley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohrid_Agreement
If Albanians truly numbered more than the last census claimed, then it would make sense for them to aggressively push for a new population census because it would give them an advantage, but they don’t.
Yes. It’s a product of the Croat-Slovene Communism of Tito’s rule where there were close to zero Serbs on population censuses until Milosevic’s time. There’s an upcoming population census and the political struggle over its exercise and the questions asked has already begun (there are obviously more Serbs that have been forced to declare as “Montenegrins” due to repression than Montenegrinoids want to admit).
“Montenegrins” also have several powerful criminal mafia groups in Serbia and only now with Vucic is their influence beginning to decrease (he has explicitly sworn to fight against mafias in Serbia recently).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zemun_Clan
Anti-Serb Montenegrin nationalists even had privileged places at Belgrade University. That’s just the low time period from 2000-2012 though …
No problem.
Most average Bosniaks follow it in a more casual sense and they are more Bosniak nationalists which is strongly tied to Islam, similar to how Serbs and Croats are tied to their religious orientations through nationalism, but many on average slack hard with their religious devotion in daily habits.
Bosniaks are absolutely ridiculous with their claims on “Bosnian statehood” and Bosnian heritage and they’ve basically hijacked anything to do with Bosnia and Herzegovina. They’ve completely ruined anything to do with Bosnia for Serbs and Croats. The thing is that “Bosnian” is not an ethnic-religious category, but a geographic category, although it seems like they’re increasingly succeeding with tying the territory to themselves and Islam.
They’ve literally hijacked the ancient lilies and symbols of the Kotromanic dynasty (which was Serb, despite unhinged Croat and Bosniak history falsification, as Tvrtko Kotromanic was crowned in a Serb monastery in Mileseva) for their “Republic” and “State” of Bosnia. They even did that for the Islamic Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina even though those symbols are Christian Serb ones …
Islamic Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina Logo:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Logo_of_the_Army_of_the_Republic_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina.svg/440px-Logo_of_the_Army_of_the_Republic_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina.svg.png
3rd Corps Logo:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ea/3rd_Corps_of_the_Army_of_the_Republic_of_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina_patch.gif
7th Special Muslim Brigade:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/7th_Muslim_Brigade.png
Hijacking Christian lily symbols for Islamic jihad purposes is absolutely ridiculous and unhinged.
The daily political-media culture of Bosniaks literally revolves around screeching about “Genocide in Srebrenica”, the existence of Republika Srpska (“Genocide entity”, “Republika forest”, “Republika Stink”, etc.), going on about ties to “the ancient Bosnian Sandzak”, and when anything goes on with Croats Bakir Izetbegovic and Bosniaks publicly proclaim and celebrate the demise and vanquishing of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina (reciting memory about the past Croatian aggression against Bosnia-Herzegovina), etc.
There are also some Bosniaks that genuinely consider themselves to be Croats or Serbs of the Muslim faith (their ethnic-national belonging is sincerely Serb or Croat while their religion is Islam), and fortunately the latter is more numerous, although both are still a minority of all Bosniaks.
In the Bosnian War there was a pro-Serb Muslim faction (different from the Sandzak Muslim faction that was interested in fighting Croats together with Serbs, and regretted going against Serbs) led by Fikret Abdic (he originally was the most popular among Bosniaks in 1991 elections but Alija Izetbegovic usurped power from him) that directly fought against Izetbegovic’s Bosniaks around Bihac from 1993-1995, and in 1994 most of them fled to Republika Srpska Krajina where they where gracefully welcomed. They then fled together (about 100,000 of them) with Krajina Serbs against Croats and Alija’s Bosniaks (the infamous Muslim 5th Army Corps of Izet Nanic at Bihac that impaled and roasted Serb POW’s alive on pikes, with Atif Dudakovic relentlessly ordering the absolute burning of every Serb village he reached) in 1995 from the Storm.
The Army of Republika Srpska also had many Serbs of the Muslim faith that fought for it, with even a special “Mesa Selimovic unit” (a famous Serb of the Muslim faith, there’s a good Serb language video about them). Still, Bosniaks have a fanatic Islamic SDA party leadership and elite that is now led and inherited by Bakir Izetbegovic, Alija Izetbegovic’s son and they pursue all the doctrines and goals of the Islamic Declaration (so basically every Bosniak that supports SDA and Bakir Izetbegovic consciously or not believes in eternal Jihad against infidels and muh Ummah).
http://www.angelfire.com/dc/mbooks/Alija-Izetbegovic-Islamic-Declaration-1990-Azam-dot-com.pdf
In Kosovo and Metohija, there is a population of Slavic Muslims called Gorani that are loyal to Serbia and have suffered because of it since then (and still do).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorani_people
They fought loyally for the Army of Yugoslavia and they were cleansed by Albanians alongside Gypsies from Kosovo and Metohija for being loyal to Serbs (and Serbs were also cleansed, of course). Many gypsies seem to be Muslim in the Balkans as well, although their religious adherence is also quite lax (like that of many people in the Balkans, really).
In that context it makes much more sense. They were a part of Hungary for a very long time.
There never was any sort of “Croatian Kingdom” and Croats literally make up whole Kingdoms and Kings they never actually had in the Medieval Ages. If you asked them to tell you the name of a single princess, queen or royal marriage any of their Kingdoms or Kings supposedly had, they wouldn’t be able to tell you.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world rely on their morning cup of coffee or tea to help them greet the new day. I wouldn’t think that they’re all possessed?
Connery was definitely the best Bond, you don’t mess around with a classic. Brosnan was Okay, but Roger Moore was always a little bit too unbelievable to play the part. Besides, he was just too old to pull of any athletic parts, a a hunkering and aging middle aged dude ( I would know). 🙂
The latest guy, who always wants to retire, just doesn’t have the good looks required for the part, IMHO.
This reminds me of something …
Destruction of Serb Orthodox Churches and heritage during the March 2004 pogrom.
I read the verses about Bodh Avatar, so? Dasam Granth is somewhat controversial among the Sikhs, or so I have understood, unlike the Guru Granth Sahib. Still even if it were not controversial, its not my religion.
Are you Udasi or Sanatan Sikh? Do you think statues or idols are okay in Sikh Dharma?
This rhetoric of “Arab womb” will be an interaction with the Arab rhetoric of the 1970s. Arafat’s famous saying was that “My strongest weapon is the womb of the Arab woman.”
The correct response from the Israeli side for the “demographic threat”, should have been always two-state solution with landswaps. (Inside Israel, the Galilee and the “triangle area” both have Arab majority populations, and could be part of landswap, which would improve Israel’s demographic viability.)
–
For example, in Gaza they still have the demographic war mentality. However, this isn’t a serious threat for Israel anymore, as Gaza is now a separate territory.
Before 2005, Gaza was under Israeli occupation, and there would be a theoretical possibility of Gazans becoming Israeli citizens in a single state solution. After 2005, it doesn’t threaten that Gaza has so many children – but this birthrate will probably more threaten the internal stability of Gaza (and Hamas itself).
In some sense, Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 (even though it results in rocket fire and occasional wars), is one of its most successful choices.
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Arabs with the highest fertility rate in Israel are the Bedouin Arabs (who have the highest fertility in the world), partly because they receive income from Israeli welfare system for each child.
Bedouin Arabs have a possibility of Islamic extremism (as in the Sinai), but they are not part of the Arafat style of Palestinian cause (for example, Bedouin men fight in the Israeli army). They are something like the nationalist equivalent of lumpenproletariat of the Arabs (without “national consciousness”, as lumpenproletariat do not have “class consciousness”).
The highest birthrate of Bedouin is also because of the high poverty, and they still live in an almost the medieval lifestyle.
It’s an effect of how you are measuring “religiosity” – for example, the “family values” which were promoted in Soviet times, have now been superficially rebranded as “religious values” promoted by the government. But the content of that has not changed, although part of the state capacity for disseminating these values into society is now expected by the government to be mediated through religious institutions.
Saakashvili’s narcissism – attack on Tskhinvali, reigniting conflict which predictably results in his tiny, impoverished third-world country (Georgia) fighting in a war with the world’s second most powerful military (Russia).
It’s very, very lucky, especially for Georgia, that the real fighting was limited for 5 days. It could have become a massacre of thousands of Georgia’s soldiers from the air (as is happening, although on much slower scale than would occur with Russian aviation, to Armenia now).
https://www.facebook.com/nikol.pashinyan/posts/2787420498244994
The extended time of fighting, in such an attritional conflict after your air defense was destroyed in the first days, is a bad thing for Armenia.
Georgia was lucky that Saakashvili has at least after 5 days of tragedy, understood his country’s weakness, and agreed to withdraw all forces. If the war was agreed to end in 5 days like with Georgia, then the deaths and losses from air attacks would be only a couple hundreds as in Georgia, instead of the thousands which are developing now in the Armenian army.
With each day, it means more and more of 19 year old conscripts, are targets for Azerbaijan’s production of drone strike and guided artillery videos.
It reminds of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film “Running Man”. Nagorno Karabakh is now an internationally allowed “killing zone”, where Azeri (or possibly Turkish) professional gamers are firing missiles and guiding precise artillery strikes on Armenian conscripts.
It’s not bravery from the politicians, as they do not enter the killing zone. They are sending other peoples’ children there, while also controlling the information space, to an extent that the conscripts don’t seem understand the nature of the new battlefield.
I have no personal experience with DMT, so can only read from other people second hand reports.
However, to the extent that “user’s experience” is necessary to account for; there seems no consensus about the nature of the experience from people who trialled the drug, except to say that the experience is a very subjectively strong one for them. http://www.organiclab.narod.ru/books/DMT-The-spirit-molecule.pdf
Of course, the fact a strong hallucinations is possible, doesn’t say whether it was “endogenous”, or if you are “astral projecting”, “talking with god” – all this can that just be metaphors that people use to emphasize the strength and strangeness of their experience or “trip”.
Psychedelic drugs are changing perception from the habitual one (which has been evolutionary useful for us).
Aldous Huxley when describing his experiences with psychedelic drugs, uses a type of Kantian metaphor of the brain as a “reducing valve”:
“According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet…. the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least sufficient, picture of reality”
https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerception.pdf
Last week I had lucid dream, caused by an alarm, which has made me stop sleeping an hour earlier (because change to the winter hour).
As I tried to re-fall asleep, I entered a dream while I was still conscious. In my imagination, I could fly around the street outside, and “paint” the buildings along the road hyper-realistically.
My sense from this kind of experience, is that we underestimate the power of their own mind and imagination. In lucid dreaming, you can paint a realistic scene as if in a virtual reality machine, from your memory.
This could involve speculation, or “over speculation”. However, in the writers like Hume or Kant, there is no such ontological speculation.
Hume is not saying “all that exists is this lawlike mechanics that we can abstract from our senses”. Rather, he is saying epistemologically “all that we have perceived with the limitations of our senses so far, can be abstracted to this mechanics”.
We are talking about our knowledge and its limits, not about what must or must not exist outside our knowledge.
Hume further shows that the perceptions so far, does not infer the future. That is one of “mysteries” which he believes he can define – the “problem” of induction.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/
It’s going into a speculative hubris. Noumenal world might be impossible to prove from our phenomenal perspective, but it doesn’t mean that there doesn’t exist noumenal world.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. To use poetic metaphor of Omar Khayyam – neither of us (and likely any other person who is still on this side of the “veil”) knows.
“Neither you not I know the mysteries of eternity,
Neither you nor I read this enigma;
You and I only talk this side of the veil;
When the veil falls, neither you nor I will be here.”
Exactly.
I have always loved the poetry of Khayyam. I had an Iranian colleague bring me the Robaiyat printed in Iran in four languages: Parsi, French, English and Arabic. Have you read Samarkand by Amin Maalouf ?
https://books.google.com/books/about/Samarkand.html?id=r3o0AgAAQBAJ
About DMT trips, I have always been afraid of trying it. The descriptions on Erowid looked too intense. But luckily the good and brave people of Qualia Research Institute have tried it for us:
https://youtu.be/HetKzjOJoy8
https://youtu.be/ppGd_nZAN2k
https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geometry-of-dmt-experiences/
Basically, listening and reading the psychonauts telling the stories of their crazy trips, I have come to the conclusion that our brain is a very complex chemical receptor tuned to receive a subset of the Whole we call Reality. You add a molecule and proof! you are connected to a completely different subset of the Whole (the Mind at Large of Aldous Huxley you mentioned above).
That’s actually the simplest explanation I have found.
And it ties nicely with the Zen/Ch’an “metaphysics” so I am fine with this explanation.
Lucid dreaming is important in Vajrayana and Bön:
https://youtu.be/h6WPMGMzklo
No and absolutely no.
Dasam Guru Granth Sahib is not controversial and anyone speaking against it is an apostate.
Wondering your thoughts on it, that’s all.
The rehit of Sikh has always forbid murti puja.
ਏਕਓਰਭਯੋਖਾਲਸਾਏੇਕਓਰਸੰਸਾਰ॥
The Khalsa stands on one side; the world on the other.
ਗੁਰਸੋਭਾਕ੍ਰਿਤ: ਕਵੀਸੈਨਾਪਤਿ (੧੭੦੮)
Gursobha, author: the Poet Sainapati (1708)
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu2-mkVhd3_/
Brosnan is the best bond, because you never felt he took it too seriously. There’s a perpetual casual smirk in his performance that I really like. And some of the best bond films of all time was done when he was the guy (Golden eye is the most obvious). Connery is a close second. I liked his portrayal, but people also overrate his acting now that he recently died (overgenerosity).
Although it’s true that Pashinyan is being more intransigent than Sargsyan ever was, Lavrov’s plan is still quite bad for Armenians. They have to give up much hard won land to Azeris and have absolutely no guarantees on a favorable outcome (for Armenians) for the final status of Artsakh. Also, it’s quite obvious that Azeris were extremely insincere in their commitment to negotiations and never wanted Russian peacekeepers in Karabakh anyway (something you don’t seem to grasp).
Azeris demand unconditional surrender. Why should Armenians accept that when they know very well what will happen to all their people and heritage in Artsakh if they do that?
Especially when they still hold more than half of Republic of Nagorno-Karabkh/Artsakh one month later.
If this is the price that Armenians are willing to pay for holding their land, then they may very well be worthy of owning it in the future. Self-sacrifice is one of the few things a seriously outmanned and outgunned party has left in a war.
Also, according to Putin there are more than 2,000 dead on the Azeri side, probably more by now.
Doesn’t matter if Azerbaijan fails to take key places like Shushi, Lachin, Kelbajar and Stepanakert by the upcoming winter.
This war may possibly even continue into spring and summer next year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/world/views-on-jews-by-malaysian-his-own-words.html
https://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/southeast/10/20/rice.mahathir/index.html
Maybe Mahathir Mohamad knows something cucked Christian goyim don’t?
Entartete Qualia.
Westerners shelled out a lot of bucks for this Genie in an electric lamp (a fine ELO album):
https://64.media.tumblr.com/b0ed9d2afadc17f64832ff2543d5abe4/tumblr_n5pq4soQjJ1twdbcpo1_500.jpg
Here is theory of Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781), and to some extent also Hume (Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748). 1700s kids can remember these views.
The update from the 19th century, would be to add something in brackets like “receive a subset (curated by evolution according to its usefulness to our organism’s survival, and non arbitrary to that extent)”.
But minus part in brackets, great philosophers like Hume and Kant wrote this (and many other interesting stuff) in the 1700s.
In terms of historical context, it was such men who were not chasing demons, witches, and escaped grandmothers’ superstitions and dogmas – , that were writing interesting and profound books in the 18th century. It was possible to understand this already for a clear minded people in the 18th century, just sitting in their room pondering to the candlelight.
Did you skim the reports of the “bad trips” from the drug trial in the book? http://www.organiclab.narod.ru/books/DMT-The-spirit-molecule.pdf Most “creative”, is the experimental participant who was raped by crocodiles on page 252.
I too do not feel a inclination to smoking DMT or Salvia, despite to being a bit of adrenaline junkie in other areas.
I enjoyed “controllable sense of weirdness” from high doses of cannabis. But even when I have eaten a low dose of psilocybin; I said “that is sufficiently weird enough” for me in this lifetime.
I assume from watching videos like below, that the extent of the “weirdness” capable of experiencing with Ayahuasca and DMT, is perhaps beyond what people who have schizophrenia in the psychiatric hospital can achieve in their wildest hallucinations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2nbnJzervs.
If we assume that after the first week of fighting (it was clear they were being raped by drones, if you watch the videos even from the first days) – that Armenia says it will withdraw all its people from Nagorno Karabakh. This would be a total political humiliation. But the end result will be that Armenia would keep alive its soldiers and most of its military equipment would survive (whereas now they have lost an amount of military equipment, that will require many years of budget expenses to replace).
Whereas what is actually happening, is very likely to lose the land, and also their army – many soldiers’ lives. (For a small country, where the main threat has been a shrinking population, poor economy and mass emigration).
So the real result is likely to be a lot worse, than an initial surrender would have been in the early days of war. Let alone that both options, are worse than accepting Lavrov’s plan, which would have included such a guarantee as Russian peacekeepers, and Armenia would maintain to be owner of the main parts of Nagorno Karabakh.
But it’s not “self-sacrifice” from the politicians. It’s sacrifice by politicians, of lives of other people, mainly young men.
If you ignore the antinationalist reality that national objectives are less valuable than the citizens’ lives – even from the nationalist point of view, the problem of Armenia is its demographics and economics, not its already sufficient landmass. Its population (especially of young people – who are emigrating) is the key for national power.
Well war of attrition where the opponent has air superiority and guided weapons, is the worst possible scenario, because the life of the young people is Armenia’s most valuable asset. In war of attrition, they will continue to be food for drones, in technologically unbalanced conflict.
It’s not just a difference of air superiority of Azerbaijan, but also guided weapons. Armenia has few guided weapons. To the extent Azerbaijan can continue to afford the high cost of guided munitions, they will motivated to continue the attrition, as their weapons can cause a lot more attrition than they can suffer from the opponents’ more limited and unguided weaponry.
As you already know, I worry about your involvement with the Eastern religions and practices (Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoga, etc;) and esoteric knowledge. The usage o psychedelic drugs is another wasted path that leads to…Dmitry is wise to backoff from these experiments and realized early on that his experiment with psilocybin was “sufficiently weird enough” for me in this lifetime.”
I’ve been reading up more and more about these influences that an indeed lead up to demon possession and worry about you. Here’s just one example o my readings in this area:
Of course, yoga may facilitate exceptional experiences of body and mind. But so does the ingestion of mind-altering drugs, and flavorless, imperceptible poisons. Through yoga, little by little, one is harnessing shakti, which yogis refer to as the Divine Mother, the ‘dark goddess’ connected with other major Hindu gods. This energy isn’t the Holy Spirit, and This isn’t aerobics or gymnastics. Attached to this entire system are bhajans and kirtans – pagan equivalents to Orthodox Christian akathists, but for Hindu gods – as well as mantras, which are ‘sacred’ formulas, like calling cards or phone numbers, to the various pagan gurus and gods…
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Hidden Fire: Orthodox Perspectives On Yoga
Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness? What harmony is there between Christ and Belial? What does a believer have in common with an unbeliever? What agreement is there between the temple of God and idols?
2 Corinthians 6:14–18 NIV
I was raised Roman Catholic. I loved prayer. Walks through woods, playing in creeks, running through the vast fields of the imagination. These were like prayer for me: the silence, the stillness, the hesychia children find themselves in almost by nature. I didn’t always stay in this prayerful place. But I recognized it. And I took it for granted, as a simple activity within the heart.
We all experience this to varying degrees. We use different words—or none at all, because they all seem so inadequate—to express the heart’s movement toward God. It seems when we are innocent in heart, especially when we are very young, there is a tangible perception of two in these experiences. Lover and Beloved. The Someone Else. As I child, I didn’t articulate this Presence as Christ—just as I never articulated my parents by their names. I just knew them.
As a high school student—my grandparents put me through an all-boy Roman Catholic high school—I wanted to be a Trappist monk. I attended services regularly and read the Bible often. Scripture really is like a door. You can enter through it and the Holy Spirit takes you places without ever really lifting your shoes off the ground. But I knew there was something more. A difference between reading about the experiences and the experience Himself.
Dr. Harry Boosalis writes in Holy Tradition: “We are not called simply to ‘follow’ Tradition or ‘mimic’ Tradition. We are called to experience it…just as the Saints have and continue to do.” We know something is missing in the world around us. Some richness, some depth we are vaguely aware of and long after. This is, of course, the richness of God’s love, light, and grace. But, at that time of my life, I didn’t have the language to express this. Like so many, I attributed this dissatisfaction, this unease, to other things.
Then a psychology professor in high school guided my class through self-hypnosis. My intrigue with meditation followed quickly thereafter. I felt relaxed. I let my guard down to new experiences. I felt as if the back door of my heart opened permanently. I rejected God ‘to go it alone on my own.’ I experienced, very clearly, a light switching off inside me. The Presence, the Someone Else, the Friend respected this decision. It felt as if He quietly left. He respects freewill. He never forces Himself. He knocks on the door of the heart and waits.
So I started meditating regularly. Initially, especially as a teenager, it was really difficult: sitting for hours with old Tibetan Buddhists, completely still, bringing my thoughts back to the bare wall and bronze statue of the Buddha in front of me. I started studying reincarnation, karma, and samsara.[1] I wasn’t yet aware of Tibetan Buddhism’s origins in the shamanistic religion called Bon, nor its embrace of astrology, magic, and other occult practices.[2]
I wanted to learn how to calm anxiety and depression, how to sweep scattered thoughts. Visiting Buddhist meditation halls and Hindu ashrams, I was intrigued by the ‘spiritual fireworks:’ the ecstasies, trances, feelings, and visions. These are associated with all levels of meditation and yoga and increase with practice. These experiences and more are sometimes referred to as siddhis, or powers acquired through sadhana (practice of meditation and yoga). Intrigue became fascination, and the fascinating became familiar. Without my noticing, my initial ‘harmless’ curiosity of the yoga and meditation hardened into habit. I spent more than a decade immersed in this spiritual sea.
During these years, lots of questions were asked. For instance, do Roman Catholic priests and monks know whether early Christians believed in the pre-existence of souls and reincarnation? They said they didn’t know. And besides, they asked, what does it matter? Reading further into the origins and meanings of Far East religions, and eager to experience the bardos—the intermediary dimensions of the material and spiritual worlds—I studied the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
I read all the mystical or esoteric literature I could get my hands on and kept a copy of the Bhagavad Gita folded in my back pocket and read the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda. I immersed myself in the writings of Osho, read Ram Dass and Ramana Maharshi, convinced there was no being more divine than myself. It was up to me to shatter my illusory self. According to so much of what I read and heard there can be no personal relationship with the Divine and this conflicted me. The calm and peaceful nature of childhood was gone. The more I delved into the meat of meditation and yoga, the more sudden and unexplainable urges I experienced to hurt myself. My soul was under attack. This was a very dark and unfortunate period of my life.
Seeking calm, I took the Bodhisattva vow and sought a contemplative and peaceful lay monastic order within Buddhism in an effort to ground myself somewhere, with something. After an initial period of relative peace, boldness developed, even recklessness, concerning spiritual activities. I was going through a sort of spiritual alcoholism. But I didn’t know it.
The Prodigal Son ate the food of pigs in a far country. But he returned home when he remembered the taste of the Bread of his Father’s house. For more than a decade I lived in this far country, eating its food.
I saw so many people—some friends, many strangers—seeking the dissolution of self. They had an insatiable desire to lose themselves, not in the life and light of God but in the darkness of the void, in a separation from the Love Who Transcends Everything. This separation is hell. Many men, women and children seek this hell, spinning through promiscuous relationships and leaping out of the windows of drugs, through which so many fall.
But I studied and practiced Kundalini Yoga and shamanism, learning the presence of fear and coldness.[3]
I grew a reputation for reading the tarot, an occult method of divination. I taught yoga and instructed groups through guided meditations and chanting in sage deserts. We experimented with astral projection – guided out-of-body experiences through the bardos described in the Tibetan books. I carried not only underlined copies of the Bhagavad Gita, but of the Upanishads and sutras of the buddhas everywhere I went.[4] Every one of these pursuits was a swim stroke away from the holy mountain of Christ. Drop water on stone long enough and you’ll whither it away. Swabbing orange paste across my forehead, I rang bells offering fruit and fire while worshipping Krishna, wandering barefoot the streets of Eugene, Portland, Seattle and finally Rishikesh, Haridwar and Dharamsala in north India.
Archimandrite Zacharias of Essex
“Separated from God Who is the source of Life,” writes Archimandrite Zacharias in his book Hidden Man of the Heart, “man can only withdraw into himself…. Gradually he is left desolate and dissolute.”
Buddhism rejects the self, the soul, and the person. It folds its arms in silence against God. Suffering is never transfigured. There are crosses in Buddhism but there is never resurrection. One could say that Buddhism finds the empty tomb and declares this emptiness the natural state of things, even the goal. In Buddhism everything—heaven, hell, God, the self, the soul, the person—is an illusion waiting to be overcome, discarded, destroyed. This is the goal. Total obliteration. In this 9th-century axiom, the essence of Buddhism is summed: ‘If you see the Buddha, kill him.’
Buddhism does not profess to—nor can it—heal soul and body. Both soul and body are to be overcome and discarded. In the Orthodox Church, however, the soul and body are meant to be healed. Buddhism teaches that nothing has intrinsic value. The Church teaches that everything God makes has intrinsic value. This includes the human body. We are complex beings. The actions of our body, mind and soul are linked. And these linked actions are directly related to our relationship with God and the spiritual realm.
For Orthodox Christians, everything—even suffering—is a hidden door through which we meet Christ, whereby we embrace one another.
One autumn, I traveled to Rishikesh, India. This city is named after the pagan god Vishnu, ‘the lord of the senses.’ Rishikesh is the ‘yoga capital of the world.’ It is generally accepted to be the place on earth where yoga originated from. For 40 days I studied and practiced the so-called secret spiritual path of integral yoga in the foothills of the Himalayas.[5] This covered not only the gym yoga of America; each class began and ended with a prayer to ‘the god of the roaring storm,’ Shiva.
This is while I was teaching English to Tibetan refugees and working for the Tibetan National Government as an editor. Yoga is historically rooted in Hinduism. Curious, I spoke with a rinpoche at the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala.[6] I asked him who or what these Hindu gods are according to Buddhist cosmology. His answer is alarming: “They are created beings, with an ego…they are spirits trapped in the air.”[7]
What is yoga? What is kundalini energy?
The literal meaning of yoga is ‘yoke.’ It means tying your will to the serpent kundalini and raising it to Shiva and experiencing your ‘true’ self. All paths of yoga are interconnected like branches of a tree. A tree with roots descending into the same areas of the spiritual world. This is evident in the ancient books the Bhagavad Gita and the Yogic Sutras of Patanjali. I learned that the ultimate goal of yoga is to awaken the kundalini energy coiled at the base of the spine in the image of a serpent so that it brings you to a state whereby you realize Tat Tvam Asi.[8]
Of course, yoga may facilitate exceptional experiences of body and mind. But so does the ingestion of mind-altering drugs, and flavorless, imperceptible poisons. Through yoga, little by little, one is harnessing shakti, which yogis refer to as the Divine Mother, the ‘dark goddess’ connected with other major Hindu gods. This energy isn’t the Holy Spirit, and This isn’t aerobics or gymnastics. Attached to this entire system are bhajans and kirtans – pagan equivalents to Orthodox Christian akathists, but for Hindu gods – as well as mantras, which are ‘sacred’ formulas, like calling cards or phone numbers, to the various pagan gurus and gods.
How is yoga connected with Hinduism?
How can anything be as satisfying as following in the faith of your ancestors, walking the true spiritual path of Theosis, one step at a time, uniting your whole being with the energies of the uncreated and eternal God?
http://www.spc.rs/eng/hidden_fire_orthodox_perspectives_yoga
I tried desperately to curtail my copy/paste to only the part in grey. The Holy Spirit must have had other ideas and copied over much more than I intended. Well, it’s all for your good Ano4, and any other spiritual souls looking for spiritual knowledge at this late (or early) hour. It’s all good. 🙂
So yoga..
Shakti is literal divine force you’re not imbibing it as its the spirit/energy of creation.
Bhakti can make you more in tune with it but ultimately Shakti lives on the battlefield||
No wonder christianity loses out where it loses info monopoly and has to argue on its own merits.
Same as most rational/lib-tard anglo takes like free market magic or logical traditions (feminism)
It was the Khanda which was first thing created by Akal Purakh and out of this the whole universe was created, says Guru Gobind Singh ji in Vaar Sri Bhagautee ji ki
ਖੰਡਾ ਪ੍ਰਿਥਮੈ ਸਾਜ ਕੈ ਜਿਨ ਸਭ ਸੈਸਾਰੁ ਉਪਾਇਆ॥
ਬ੍ਰਹਮਾ ਬਿਸਨ ਮਹੇਸ ਸਾਜਿ ਕੁਦਰਤੀ ਦਾ ਖੇਲੁ ਰਚਾਇ ਬਣਾਇਆ ॥ (ਸ੍ਰੀ ਦਸਮਗ੍ਰੰਥ ਸਾਹਿਬ)
Khanda prithame saaj ke jin sabh saisaar upaea
Brahama, Bisan, Mahes saaj kudrati da khel rachae banaea
The sword the root of Shakti is also the true form of the Great Mother who birthed all creation||
https://twitter.com/Khalsa_Ak47/status/1287446077717839873?s=20
I think I have read this tirade before, there are so many falsehoods that Im too lazy to refute each one by one. At least I can address couple ones, the Tibetam Bon has its origins in Buddhism and not vice versa, there was Shamanistic Bon in the time of the Tibetan empire, but modern Yungrung Bon is totally different and heavily or completely transformed religious system.
This reveals quite a lot about the writer, Osho is not a Hindu, Yogananda belonged to a dubious and strange sect, so called Kriya Yoga, which was established in 1860s, Ram Dass is an American bisexual and drug using new age Jew. Ramana Maharshi is only normal religious teacher in this his list(still a Vedantist). Clearly the writer is someone who was anxious and spiritually very lost, no one is going to walk any path by that attitude, reading pieces there and there, mixing philosophical systems and tenets, following strange new age cult leaders, thank heavens that he found some peace in Orthodoxy. Such diatribe is clearly product of agitated and confused mind. No Tibetan monk is going to answer that any being is created, so clearly he just lies. “Spirits trapped in the air,” oh boy ha ha, clear reference of the Biblical demons. Actually people like this are somewhat common among those who quickly change one religion to another, again and again. They are constantly frustrated and they try to find new emotional and spiritual “high,” they come to some religion and are so happy for some time, eager to condemn all those philosophies or faiths that they followed in the past, maniacally praising their current faith but one day high goes away and new religion just cant give that same stimulation as it did once before, so again they get agitated and they start to look for a new faith or lose their faith in religions completely. Very common among the western hippies and new age people. Thats why its often much better for a westerner to look a religion that is culturally near him or psychologically more suited to him, exoticism isnt strong enough ground to build a house. I knew once a guy who was once a Buddhist, then a Hare Krishna and now thankfully Christian, at least for time being, but he was and maybe still is a very confused person.
Also there are many other systems of Yoga than the Ashtanga Yoga with its Kundalini snake. Buddhism and Jainism have their own systems of Yoga.
For Mahayana Buddhists, everything—even suffering—is a hidden door through which we meet Buddha, whereby we embrace one another.
That would be surrendering without a fight.
They were likely referring to withdrawing civilians, especially those near the frontline. It’s actually somewhat impressive that they’ve managed to do so in a way that doesn’t damage morale.
What’s the point of military equipment if it’s never going to be used as a deterrent or in a war?
I think you underestimate just how much Armenians feel mortally endangered by Azerbaijan and Turkey (at least those that actually live in the Caucuses).
If you bothered to follow the Caucuses a bit more closely, you would’ve realized that in July 2020 Armenia and Azerbaijan had an armed clash over their state border around Tovush.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2020_Armenian%E2%80%93Azerbaijani_clashes
Armenians know very well that Russia will not commit to its CSTO obligations unless it absolutely must, meaning that Azeris and Turks feel bold enough to make probing attacks on Armenia’s borders as they’ve already done at least a few times.
Even with a Russian military base in your country as a basic security guarantee, it’s hard to grow your population and economy in circumstances like those of Armenia. Moderate levels of peace and stability are usually basic prerequisites for such a thing.
Perhaps maybe I’ve misunderstood what Lavrov’s Plan is? I assume that it is simply the Madrid Prcinples of the OSCE Minsk Group which Lavrov supports?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid_Principles#Principles
I don’t think you’ve understood the undesirable and problematic parts of this for Armenians. They have no guarantee whatsoever or certainty about a favorable status for them in Nagorno-Karabakh. It should also be painfully obvious by now that Azeris never liked this from the start and were simply waiting for an opportunity for war to get what they want, which is exactly what they’re trying to do now.
You make it sound like Pashinyan is “brainwashing” Armenians.
In reality, significant numbers of Armenians, both in the Caucuses and from the diaspora, are eager and willing to fight and die regardless of Pashinyan or other politicians (to a degree, arguably despite them).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-armenia-azerbaijan-volunteers/with-ropes-and-wooden-guns-returning-armenians-train-for-war-idUSKBN27E23R?il=0
If Armenians win, then it will be worth it.
After all, they simply need to hold out till winter, which means for at least 1 more month (somewhat easier said than done). It’s not like Azerbaijan has an endless supply of Israeli and Turkish weaponry for such a purpose.
This war is decisive in determining the fate of Armenia and Azerbaijan for at least the next few decades, if not further into the future. It’s as close to all or nothing as it gets.
Of course it’s nothing new. Well before the western Enlightenment, thousands of years ago, Hindustani sramana and Chinese sages came to similar conclusions (Upanishads, Tso te king). This is probably simply due to the way our consciousness functions.
Neurobiology is supposedly the “next frontier ” of the scientific learning, so we will probably learn more about consciousness in the next decades.
Perhaps we will learn how demons appear and disappear, maybe we will learn to conjure them at will. And possibly that would not be such a good idea, just like trying DMT is probably a bad idea for most people.
I’m sure that there’s truth in what you write, as I find you to be quite an honest fellow, as I do in what the author of this piece states. He admits to having taken part in both Hindu and Buddhist practices and tries to differentiate the two, although he may be a little bit confusing here. He does not specifically state that Bon is a Hindu system here.
Two things really stick out as I read this piece:
Do you have any problem in accepting this author’s comparison of the two faiths and summation here?
A woman that I know has been involved with a group of practitioners of kundalini yoga and I’m concerned that she may be getting into something way above her head here. Any thoughts here would be appreciated.
Sorry, not Ashtanga but Hatha Yoga, Ashtanga Yoga is just modernized version of Hatha Yoga.
Yep, a total new age nutcase, in my opinion its not very dignified to take such people seriously….
This reply was meant for Anon4, however, feel free to reply as well.
You just seem to be too sophisticated in your knowledge of the Eastern religions to be satisfied with “sweeping the floor, walking the dog or drinking a cup of tea”. Similarly, your study of these paths seems too absorbing and meticulous for the purposes that you state. I really don’t doubt you, I just find it all to be amazing.
I was hoping that you’d concentrate on answering the two questions that were posed in #157. I’ll look up and read the piece that you’ve suggested. Thanks.
I hope that you find your cat. I once lost one that I loved very much and it was a harrowing experience. 🙁
If my reply is not distinctly needed, then its better that Ano4 replies. Although your question is good and theres a fine list of common misconceptions about Buddhism. But I should warn you, such arguing is not always beneficial for owns own faith, if that faith is not well established and reasoned.
Well then theres an another more hidden question that I want to answer, more implicit in your text, concerning Buddhist faiths relationship with some other belief systems.
The relationship between Buddhism, and Shamanism and other Pagan faiths is quite more complicated than Christianitys relationship is towards the traditional and ancestral pagan faiths. When Buddhism meets a traditional polytheistic, shamanistic or animistic system of faith, it does not try to disprove them and convert people away from them, but actively tries to syncretize and engage with those faiths. Buddhism tries to uphold that which is good in them, but still at the same time actively fights against those practices that go against Buddhist core values, like by stopping blood sacrifices, both human and animal, by discerning which which local gods or spirits are actual demonic entities and should not be given any offerings and so on. Polytheistic and shamanistic faiths fit perfectly in the larger Buddhist framework of reality. Actually all views fit in the Buddhist framework, so maybe its better to say that those so called pagan faiths can be harmoniously integrated with the Buddhism. After all gods and spirits are all part of the samsaric and cyclical existence, they too feel happy, sad, have motivations and goals, and can change just like human beings. This syncretism has happened everywhere where Buddhism has historically spread.
It would be useful deterrent if these tanks could be used on the battlefield, rather than destroyed by drones from the air, as is the situation now.
They would be deterrent, if Armenia had invested in adequate air defense systems to protect its tanks from being destroyed from the air.
Most Armenian tanks are probably not engaged, but destroyed (hundreds according to the videos) by drones.
To the extent the tanks were useful – it was in using up of Azerbaijan’s budget in guided weapons. But using up Azerbaijan’s oil budget is hardly a great benefit for Armenia.
Certainly Armenian morale had been very high. Armenian soldiers were dancing and seemed in high morale at the onset of the conflict.
https://twitter.com/200_zoka/status/1311428942994247682
But this is likely product of the control of the information space by the authorities, which is providing the population with stories about great victories on the battlefield, and claiming that they are destroying hundreds of Azerbaijan’s tanks,. In this sense, it would be better in the country had invested less in morale, more in air defense.
Hence why in Lavrov’s plan, there would be Russian peacekeepers on the borders.
“Mortally endangered by Azerbaijan and Turkey” – now its army to be destroyed from the air by Azerbaijan/Turkey in an area where there is no international obligation for Russia to interfere. They fell into a predictable trap in my opinion.
When we look at the Armenian media, it is full of stories about how they are winning the war, and no description about the reality we see from the drone videos.
This is also probably contributing to the casualties, as the soldiers seem to continue to bunch into large groups in the daily drone videos. This one from today – the soldiers still bunch into a group.
It’s possible that many of the soldiers and conscripts are making decisions without a full information about the nature of the battlefield, because the politicians want to boost their morale. (Politicians who are safely in their offices).
They could “win” (in the sense of pausing the conflict) if there is international intervention, likely from the US Democrat Party, if it wins the election. Armenia already lost control of most of the land that was in Lavrov’s plan. They will not be able to regain this land they have lost. To rebuild their army’s equipment and manpower will also be many years.
It’s also possible that Azerbaijan will gain firecontrol over the main logistical route. The war is progressing faster than predicted (last month military analysts were saying it would be at least 6 months to capture such a fortified and mountainous territory). Whereas it now already seems like Azerbaijan is fighting for firecontrol on strategic mountains in the centre of the territory.
Its a possibility, charlatans are quite common among various circles of Yoga, strange pseudo Buddhist groups or some other new age sects. I think that there is somewhat similar situation with some of the charismatic or evangelical Christian groups. One should always beware those who offer easy and quick solutions to lifes problems. My knowledge about the vast Hindudharma is very small, but what I now checked from Wikipedia(yes sad!), it seems that Kundalini practice is part of the Shakti traditions of Hinduism and like I once mentioned, in Shaktism they very much worship Kali and other such beings. I cant express my personal opinion regarding such things, just that Buddhists dont worship her.
Hi Dmitry,
I have been following your discussions about demons and parallel realities with different commenters from the previous thread.
I am generally on your side but I think that you may not have a very rational approach to the possibility of personally exploring how real or illusory these alleged phenomena are. You said that if someone assured you that a room in a house where you were staying was haunted you would rather avoid sleeping there.
I don’t quite understand this. If I was offered that opportunity, I would be very glad to spend the night in that room and see by myself if there was any paranormal activity there. In the very odd chance that there was, it might be a scary, unpleasant situation but I would finally have some evidence that ghostly creatures exist.
I wouldn’t have to discuss these matters from a purely theoretical stance anymore and, most importantly for me, I could start having some hope for an afterlife. What’s not to like?
Granted, if such things existed, you might as well end up being possessed by a bad spirit or something but I don’t know why they may get angry by your staying in the same room. That sounds like a very childishly unlikely behavior to me. At any rate, the probabilities of actually seeing any ghost are exceedingly small. I cannot believe that the countless people that claim to see these things are all so stupid to let pass the opportunity of getting the prizes that various scientific groups have set up for anyone who could provide empirical evidence of a paranormal phenomenon of any kind.
I think that the combined amount of these prizes is in the millions of dollars currently. The fact that after decades nobody has been able to cash in on any of them shows how unlikely the existence of these phenomena is.
I agree here.
Pashinyan refusing to integrate Armenia’s anti-air system with Russia’s seems to be the single worst decision that he has ever made since he got into power.
What will the US Democrat Party to do stop Azerbaijan, Turkey and Israel from prosecuting this war?
Sanctions (not on Israel of course)?
Are they willing to threaten anything else beyond that?
Why should they?
Is there anything else besides Turkey buying Russia’s S-400’s that really bothers US Democrats here?
Perhaps most importantly of all, is it in their interests to stop this?
I don’t think so …
There are versions of Buddhism for which this is true, but particularly in the Zen tradition and in certain versions of the Mahayana, the point is rather to be liberated from false assumptions implanted in us by society that lead to dissatisfaction, frustration, and suffering.
Its not a desire to obliterate the self or the world, but to liberare one from the notion that the world is composed of individual things – which creates fear, alienation, and clinging – and to see rather that the world is a unified field. Science is already approaching this view.
You continue existing as before. You just realize now you are not a “self” in the sense of being totally independent of everything else. You are a particular pattern in a unified field. Realizing this, anxiety dissolves and you no longer cling to your life – the anxiety to survive at all cost dissipates, realizing there is no independent self that can die, releasing all that energy that was eaten up by worry to live joyously and freely.
This is very similar to Jesus’s “give up your life to gain”. By giving up the notion of a seperate self, you are freed from anxiety and can truly live for the first time.
All religions have a version of this understanding that we must give ourselves and the world up, and unfortunately it has often been made into a dismal philosophy of world rejection, when correctly understood, it is tremendously life affirming.
Ironically, accepting Death releases you to live life joyously. Jesus understood this. Not clinging to things in this world, frees you to enjoy them.
I think Norman O Brown wrote that the primordial reoression all social conditions since the dawn of time has inflicted on us is the idea that “you must survive at all costs” – such a view poisons life at the outset, filling it with anxiety and care, and clinging. The Eastern Ways of Liberation try to free us from these notions.
Robert Fisk is dead.
He was a remarkable journalist.
Rest in peace.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/11/2/veteran-journalist-robert-fisk-dies-aged-74-irish-times