I am a friggin MULTI TRILLlONAIR . how about that?

When I was cleaning up all out dated junk I stumbled over the box with Family memorabilia that goes back to  my grand father born in the late 19th century.

5 trillion ReichsMark

In that box I found a wrapped bundle of post WW2 German 5 billion ReichsMark banknotes in mint condition to understand the numbers you have to know that the European names of the quantities are different in the USA.
A Million is the same in Europe
A Billion is A Milliard in Europe
A Trillion is in Europe a Billion 
So one of these bills is not but as you can see is 5,000 Milliard = 5000 Billion ReichsMark so this bank note is Five Trillion ReichtsMark and there are 500 of these bills in this wrapper...  This is a piece of history that testifies of the huge inflation of the money in post WW1 Germany.
People went to buy a a bread with a wheel-barrel filled with 50 Million ReichsMark bank notes in wrappers..  or if they were lucky a wrapper of these  5 trillion notes.
It is one of the most extreme cases of monetary inflation in history and this took only a few years  to get to in these ludicrous numbers.
Of course the cost of the paper and ink to print this kind of money makes the production price higher than the currency it represents. My mother who told me the story about this money and also said that this would probably never would happen again to a country because in that time the financial systems were guaranteed by law..
In 2004 saw a 10 million Lyra bill of turkey on Schiphol (Amsterdam International) Airport and I made a remark to my son, "look Turkey is a country of millionaires" but that still wasn't the size of the ReichsMark bills.

A few days ago a friend of mine sent me a banknote from Zimbabwe and that really blew my mind :

100,000,000,000,000 Zimbabwe Dollar..

ONE HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS

It is probably worth something like 7 Euro or 8 US Dollar but having this framed on the wall gives me this Scrooge McDuck feeling from the story that he changed his entire fortune for one single bank note that he put in his money warehouse and almost died of boredom because he could not swim in it any more..
back to reality, this kind of inflation of money as always is caused by corrupt and criminal government, one can laugh about it , but is really is a horrible disgrace that this still happens in the world

A Dutchman in Mexico (based on a dream)

There I was in a room at  hotel Continental in CD Juarez Mexico , feeling I have just done the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life..
I was in Juarez with no luggage, only my cellphone and suit and tie looking like Penn Jilette from Penn and Teller wearing a hat, and my only company was probably the only mosquito in miles around, and of course I had no fly swatter..
It was the strangest flight ever and it all was in a haze, day before yesterday I won the jackpot in the Kings birthday lottery, well actually it was a fifth of the jackpot because I had only a fifth of a ticket , but one fifth of 42  million was still over 8 million Euro ..
It was the only time I had bought a lottery ticket and right away 1st prize..
So, wearing suit and tie in a city where I have seen no one ever wears a suit and tie, I must be sticking out like a black fly on the North Pole ..
It was a good thing that I had the clarity of mind to get Mexican currency from a money machine, at least I could get something to eat in the restaurant down stairs..
I  locked the mosquito in the room serving it right for following me ..
In the restaurant, the only thing I could recognize was Pizza and I ordered one by pointing the menu card, and there I found something that made me happy, they had Carta Blanca the best beer I have ever had in my entire life..
With a shock it came to mind that I had to speak Spanish again an that was a long time ago.. "y tambien una carta blanca" I added and the waiter nodded and wrote it down..
Again I thought "what the hell am I doing here" and almost directly the same thought answered this question, "are you stupid? you came to look for the love of your life to who you said goodbye 5 years ago that evening at your goodbye party the last time you were there"..

It never happened before that my own thoughts spoke to me like I was another person, but that voice made sense so I decided to listen to it .
It felt like being Disney's Pluto in the cartoon where his good conscience was talking in one ear trying to prevent the mischief that his bad conscience ( red withhorns) was talking in his other ear.
I took my cellphone and laid it in front of me on the table after activating the touch screen and there she was looking at me Maria from Mexico, after all these years her picture was still the wallpaper of my phone, it just moved to every new cellphone I had since the last time I met her ..
Of course that was the reason I was here, again after the many times I have visited this city just to be with her, I even learned to find my way here..
The contacts list of my phone was only a finger tap away, but I hesitated.. to call her with a Dutch Sim card would be very expensive, it was better to purchase a Mexican Sim card for my phone..
Hm.. that would be a task at this hour of day after all it already was almost 11 pm, maybe the waiter could help me.  I thought about the right way to ask the question when he was already approaching with the beer I ordered.  With a hand gesture I made him wait and told him "Quiero comprar una tarjeta SIM para mi celular" (I like to buy a sim card for my cellphone) and I half expected a negative answer but I was wrong , without changing his facial expression he answered me " movistar, telmex o america movil ?" three possible providers ..
Maybe it wasn't that a strange question after all , I decided for Movistar since I had used that in my previous visits .
I wanted to get my wallet but the waiter was already walking back to the rear of the restaurant .
Maria's smile was still shining at me from the screen of the phone, maybe it would scare the crap out of her to discover that I was here , maybe she would be happy to see me, hey I was rich now .....  "ding ding" went the voice in my head "why do you need this Sim card, you have more money than you can ever spend on the phone, moron! "
The Waiter returned with my pizza and a Sim card, I felt really embarrassed and I hope he would not notice it..
Well if he did, he did not show it, I paid him for the Sim card and put it the inside pocket of my jacket..
The pizza was huge like the wheel of a small car, I could never eat that alone ! and again I looked at the phone where the picture of Maria already turned black to save the phone battery..
One hour and five Carta Blanca beers later I paid the check and went back to my room, I opened the door and the mosquito flew out so I closed the door quickly to prevent it coming in again..
They say "New York, the city that never sleeps" well it is the same for the place where I was now, the traffic noise never stops, I laid down on the bed and in a distance I heard a truck horn blow the melody of La cucaracha and I fell asleep..
A Dutchman in the city of Juarez south of the border with El Paso Texas, probably the most out of place person in the world, but crazy enough for me it felt like being home.

2

The sound of the city of Juarez woke me up, the ever present nose of traffic just turned up a few points on the volume scale, from my window has a view on "Avenida 16 de septiembre" just around the corner I saw  two buses of the city public transport with their heavy V8 diesels thundering through  followed by two taxis hunting for costumers and a beer truck of my favorite brand..
That was my first look outside the hotel room window nothing changed since the last time ..
I got dressed, the black suit and tie started to look silly but It was the only I had with me, I smirked when I thought with a pair of black sunglasses I would look like a man in black from the movie.
I took some money from my wallet and put it in one of the pockets of my black suit pants ..
Downstairs I returned the Key-card of the room and turned to walk to the exit of the hall.. I hesitated for a moment, "call her" went the voice in my head, but my hands would not move to reach for my phone "it was not yet the right time" I decided and walked outside in to traffic ready for a stiff stroll to more familiar places in the city.
I started to walk southwards, it would not be that far to the Juarez Mercado, city market, maybe I could get some less conspicuous clothes there ..
The weather was great, and filled with optimism I walked the sidewalk of Avenida Lerdo and turned left at  " AV 16 de Septiembre". A taxi pulled over in my direction, the driver inviting me in "taxi sir ?" I declined his offer, he was the first of many. I guess that is what you get walking there in a suit and tie and being mistaken for an American from the USA..
I remembered an earlier visit when two young guys approached me and gave me a push "hey Gringo" .. I thought I was in big trouble and bewildered I said "no amigo, no soy gringo, soy de Holanda" (no my friend I am no gringo I am from Holland) and these turned out to be a magic words that initiated a total change in attitude towards me.
"OOOOH Holanda" and these guys turned out to be soccer fans and knew the names of every player in the Dutch national soccer team..
Even though I knew nothing at all of that subject we had a nice talk and greeted each other and that was it. Being alongside this crowded street I hoped these words would not have lost their magic five years later.
Damn I was totally forgotten how large this city is and how long the streets are.
Fortunately the city market was easy to find and not really that far from where I was but it still took me a 2 hour walk 7 declined taxis, on  AV 16 de Septiembre to get to my destination, the city market with it's outdoor cafe/restaurants it's leather shops for most visitors a place to go to ..
But the place wasn't like I remembered there was something strange I could not place well first I would have a bottle of Carta Blanca and then I would look for something to surprise Maria with..
Then the weirdest thing happened, I woke up in my bed in my own house ..
Again a dream had fooled me, but it wasn't a bad dream, but I was really angry with myself that I did not call Maria in the Hotel, Now I completely missed that part..

Well it was the day after our King's birthday and I got my lottery ticket, opened the website of the state lottery and filled in the number of the ticket..
It wasn't the jackpot, but I had a prize.. the lowest there was: only one single Euro ..
But hey, maybe , just maybe the dream will come true, on an other lottery ticket I now will buy every month, just one, because it keeps the dream alive ..

There is a weird thing laying on the moon

I often encounter radical Atheists, who not only NOT believe in (any) god, but as it looks like they believe nothing  and dismiss every question mark added to official statements as a hoax or conspiracy theory..
Myself I am hugely skeptical about these things , but I think is is foolish to dismiss it this way like hogwash.
I can give you an example of what intrigues so much I am doing research on all the things I can find about it and doing the usual thing like cutting away the bullshit until I reach something that cannot be cut away because it simply is there and there is evidence to prove it .

The following is one of these things and I had a discussion about it on some discussion website and the Question was " would you rather go to the moon or to mars and I chose the option I would rather go to the moon..

If it was only do see what the hell this thing is :

space ship or hoax ?

I don't know if the top picture is real or part of a hoax created about it but the second picture is real and if you enlarge it you will see it as taken from Apollo 11 in 1969

Original data:
Image Collection:  Panoramic
Mission:  15
Magazine:  P
Revolution:  38
Latitude / Longitude:  19° S / 117.5° E
Lens Focal Length:  24 inch

Click here to see the original Apollo filmstrip

Camera Look:  Forward
Camera Altitude:  117 km
Sun Elevation:  27°
Stereo Pair:  AS15-P-9630
Film Type:  3414
Film Width:  5 inch
Image Width:  45.24 inch
Film Color:  black & white

ginal image properties:
Source:
Lunar and Planetary Institute

Is it so crazy that I am curious ? But guess what happens when I share this with other, mostly American atheists and skeptics suddenly the skeptical part is gone and they apparently just wave the curiosity away and dismiss any evidence or indications  as a hoax or a conspiracy theory.
Isn't that the same thing as Christians do ? they tend to ignore the proof about their beliefs being based on fantasies and dismiss them the same way as their indoctrination has taught them to..
To my opinion -EX Christian- Atheist skeptics aren't skeptical at all this way.
In my book Skeptical means being open minded but evaluate things and cut a way the crap to see what will be left over .
These kind of Atheists just dismiss these things like this example of that thing on the moon..
Read what I got from an American agnostic/when I brought this example up
Mind that I already explained, I am not a UFO freak or conspiracy theorist about the government hiding stuff  AND that I already have been cutting away the things I have my serious doubts about..
Guess what I got from an American agnostic/when I brought this example up?

"It is Just a rock"  that was it ..  No interest, no curiosity, just dismissal.. 

trying to spark a little curiosity in him I answered :

Ok if it is "a rock" how did that rock get there ? There were no ice ages and no erosion on the moon. There are no no bolders on the moon as we know them..
There is no force on the moon that can have pushed it there
How about a rock that looks like it's "nose" is painted in another color? And this odd bulge on top of it ?

It cannot have fallen there from outer space because it is not in the center of the crater but actually rests along side the slope of a more a less oval shaped shallow hole close to the Iszak crater (which really is an impact crater)
Notice it is like 3.5 mile long and about 3rd of a mile in diameter
It's an abnormality, like it does not belong there ..

Again I am very skeptical about the hype about it on youtube and these UFO "science" websites... Even if it IS a rock I just REALLY would like to see it for real from up close ..

His answer:

how did a rock get there?????? The moon is covered with ROCKS as the moon is made up of rocks, not green cheese as some have tried to make us believe. :)).

Even jokingly, to my opinion this is a defense of his dismissal of my arguments so I gave him another reply:

You are so rigid in your opinion that you totally ignore anything else.
Sure the moon surface has countless rocks but no ROUND rocks because there is no erosion and this thing does not only have no sharp edges it is way too big to be a rock and that is what makes it so weird

And of course he chose the easy way out:
(quote)"Notice it is like 3.5 mile long and about 3rd of a mile in diameter
It's an abnormality, like it does not belong there .." (quote)
Rounded because of lack of erosion, please. Have you ever seen a rock that size not "Rounded" And there is slight erosion on the moon, trillions and trillions of particles streaming in from space over billions of years tend to round edges. Where do you think all the moon dust comes from.

I have done some reading about moon dust to know that it is completely different than what we call sand and I explained that to him:

Moondust under a microscope

 you are using religious arguments like "were you there" and this erosion you talk about is nothing compared to earth erosion where everything  constantly is in motion..
The moon dust is most probably the pulverized rock that is the result of millions of meteorite impacts
Moon dust is generally very sharp edged compared to earth dust.
Why? there is no erosion on the moon.

 
.

Sand under a microscope

Earth dust (we call sand) is generally rounded without sharp edges. Guess why ..

This thing I refer to has not fallen to the moon like an asteroid because there is no crater
Did you look at the original photo strip?
(when you view it it is the original size) the Iszak crater  on the same strip shows a real impact crater..
If an asteroid of the size of this weird object had impacted there , the crater would have been immense still it is just laying there on the slope of this hole ...
You can deny it as much as you want but it does not change that it is still there. 

I am still waiting for his answer, but it will probably never come , same as what happens when I out-argue a religious believer..
I had no intention to force my opinion about this moon thing on him, I only wanted to explain to him WHY I would so much to see this thing with my own eyes from up close - I want to know - and isn't this what human life is about ? Curiosity ?  Finding plausible explanations that can be scientifically proven ?
We are living in a time of discovery and gaining knowledge..
When Skeptical becomes Dismissal it is only a few steps away from Dogma, all the open mindedness, inquisitiveness and freethinking and most of  all THINKING FOR YOURSELF  is thrown out of the window..

Ane personally I find this very disturbing..

The Empathy Imperative

Sometimes , when I am not shouting out my frustration on my blog and various Internet websites, I read a book. I not much of a reader I am more the "I wait for the movie to be released" kind of person.

The Empaty Imperative

Recently I got this book that was recommended to me by a friend,a novel called: The Empathy Imperative and is written by the American author Max T Furr.

I really love these science fiction stories that are situated in the near future and I started a search where I could purchase this which turned out to be problematic
Since I don't have a credit card I could buy it on line and ordering it through a dutch book store would cost me a small fortune this friend sent it to me by mail..

Where you have "who done it"  detective novels, I think The Empathy Imperative tells the ultimate "what if" Science Fiction story..
When I started reading , I felt the romance, further on it started an uneasy feeling of worry in my mind, like it offered me a very realistic sneak preview into a bleak apocalyptic future where Murphy's law, "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong", becomes fact..
Then all things made a mind blowing turn that grabbed hold of me to the end..
"The Empathy Imperative" stayed in my mind for weeks, "what if everything in life is true, what if every truth is a lie at the same time ??"
Read it and find out..

Atheist TV and what kind of an atheist I am..

Announcement of American Atheists

The First Atheist TV Channel

American Atheists is excited to announce what is believed to be the first atheism-dedicated television channel, Atheist TV. 

In partnership with Internet-streaming service Roku, which offers devices similar to cable boxes to bring hundreds of channels of content to your TV, American Atheists will bring together dozens of atheist content creators, including The Richard Dawkins Foundation, to present the first on-demand television station that presents exclusively atheist, humanist, and freethought programming. In addition, American Atheists is making available its recently-digitized historic video archives spanning more than 50 years of activism. 

It is really a crying shame that something like American Atheist TV is necessary to give an objective and skeptical counter balance to all the religious bias and propaganda on the USA TV network

In the Netherlands where I live in Europe, the objectivity of the commercial TV channels and the several Broadcasting Associations participating in Dutch Public TV is a matter of honor..
Here we have this unwritten code of integrity where it comes to bringing the news and even the few Evangelical broadcasters honor that code because distorting news would be like committing public confidence suicide..


Since this announcement I have been battling several fanatic believers about the necessity of such a TV channel in the USA in the context of the multitude of religion and religiously biased channels like ...  mostly ALL of them..
And I constantly have to explain myself why I am so aversive to Christianity and religion in general..

the reason ?  read the next (earlier) blog on this page

A successfully brainwashed world

I had a revelation

Not of the divine kind, far from that, it was more of studying the gathered pieces of a puzzle and suddenly seeing every one of them spontaneously perfectly falling in place.  It was like the Eureka moment after discovering the Archimedes Principle, that made Archimedes forget to put his clothes on and run naked in the streets shouting "Eureka eureka I found it I found it"  I am a little more down to earth and instead of running through the streets naked, I hurried to get a notebook and pencil to write it down before it would slip my mind. As a result of that I will try to make heads of tails of it for the first time in this text.

Richard Dawkins has a seven point scale  to help people describe themselves with regard to their level of conviction about theism and atheism.
1.    Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God
2.    De facto theist. Very high probability but short of 100 per cent
3.    Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50 per cent but not very high
4.    Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50 per cent but not very low
5.    Completely impartial. Exactly 50 per cent
6.    De facto atheist. Very low probability, but short of zero.
7.    Strong atheist. the type of I know there is no God

However I would even consider myself type  8.
It is like adding a step from the superlative to get the to exaggerative with the only purpose  to show  that I mean business..

Type 8 is a Type 7 with a serious attitude, because  I seriously dislike the word atheist, it  still indicates  existence of theism and the religious principle, which  I completely dismiss as an insult to any intelligence (including insects) and the summit of idiocy that is not even worth a split second of my attention.

If it weren't for the constant stream of divine creation apologetics I have to cut through every day, I would not even think of it -at all- .... like no one  should..
The utmost preposterous  idea  alone that we were created, or intelligently were designed....  makes me wonder  how  human intelligence can be lowered  to even consider this .... (silence)...
There are just no words I can use to describe the insanity of even the idea like we and the universe were made by some magical high and mighty "whatever" that hocuspocused us in existence.

IF we were created, it would more be like our existence is a particle size result of an experiment in a hadron collider, where our whole universe popped in to existence for less than a nanosecond representing for us a time span of a trillion years.. So at best our creators are scientists running this experiment and are totally unaware of us ..
Ridiculous one would say ? well considering the increasing rate of scientific discoveries,  this idea is on the probability scale still an infinite of numbers Higher than (any) god being responsible..

However , this is not about Atheism versus Religion  even though that is one of my favorite subjects.
After all the discussions in American Internet  forums, being an outsider from the Netherlands  I  discovered something, that is far more disturbing, happening to the American people, and this is slowly spreading  like a disease namely the slow death of objectivity in all people religious and atheist alike .

I used an American opinion website called Sodahead.com  to see how far this was going, by writing carefully composed opinionated  posts about "religion being hogwash" and as I expected the religious believers -Theists- did not agree and the non believer -Atheists- fully agreed .

Then I made some politically opinionated posts and there the outcome was, the conservatives disagreed and the liberals agreed, but there the difference between Theists and Atheists was not as much as the first result

Next I made a post about taking everything on faith or being skeptical in matters of religion with the fairly predictable  outcome that Theists were in favor of faith and Atheists in favor of being skeptical

So far no earth shattering results but when I wrote a post about why the word “truther” has such a bad meaning to it suddenly everything changed, although the subject was entirely about the word, apparently no one read it because almost everyone showed to have almost an equal condemning opinion about  the 9/11 truther movement as a bunch of nutcases with their head screwed on backwards..
Suddenly the conspiracy theories started flying, and of course everyone, Theists and Atheists alike agreed that these conspiracy theories all were lies of people with certain agendas.

I decided to introduce some of these conspiracy theories.

Magic bullet diagram .

When I brought up the magic bullet that supposedly killed Kennedy after making some mid air turns defying all laws of Newtonian and other Physics, almost everyone turned against me like I was a conspiracy theorist (which I am certainly not) and I decided to go a step further and asked the, in my eyes,  most important, but always miserably answered questions about  9/11

#1 Where was the debris of American Airlines flight 77  that supposedly crashed in to the pentagon?

where is the debris ?

 #2 Where was the debris of United Airlines Flight 93 that supposedly crashed in a field near Shanksville  Pennsylvania?

Where is the debris ?

These are very valid questions that remain unanswered.

Suddenly any sign of skepticism was gone , Theist and Atheist, Conservative and Liberal suddenly were one force defending the official government statement that both planes must have disintegrated on a molecular level due to the high velocity impact.
(The reason I chose this answer of many is because I know from very reliable scientific source that such molecular disintegration can only be reached in a nuclear explosion)
GONE was all skepticism in the Atheists.. Gone was all objectivity in Liberals ..
As one person they defended at least two incidents of which the official reports defied each and every law of Newtonian and other physics.
None of these people were uneducated (I might hope) none of them was stupid but in a strange  manner they abandoned their principles of being skeptical and being objective about official statements when it came to the Kennedy assassination and the 9/11 attack.

Isn't this just plain weird ?

Even the Atheists who have become totally skeptical an rejecting every religious claim show they still have the tendency to believe what the other source of indoctrination, the commercial bought and paid for News Media with people of the likes of  Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck and whatever biased and opinionated media personality of whatever news station wants them to believe..


Isn't this weird or is it just me ...

The birth of the Universe ? Comprehend the Incomprehendable..

One of current time most studied subjects in science is the mystery how the Universe came in to existence.

In the past century mankind made incredible advancements in acquiring  knowledge and the most important astronomical discoveries is undoubtedly the expanding of the universe..

That really was the revelation that led to the explanation how the Universe started.

Symplified it came to this :

firework viewed backwards

 If an object is moving in a certain direction, it is not that difficult to find the origin of this movement.

You just have to reverse the trajectory (basically view the film backwards) and you can see where it came from..

From the measured speed of the expansion it is also quite simple to calculate WHEN that happened (speed = traveled distance : time )

Of course the mathematics used to calculate the place and time of origin aren't that simple but the outcome shows that our universe originated from one single spot 13.8 billion years ago.

 A torrent of scientific discoveries proved theories that thus far only existed in theoretical and physical mathematics..

The religious perception as estimated Archbishop James Ussher in 1594, that placed the creation of the universe at 4004 BC was  hereby, definitely and finaly totally, refuted..

But that is a different story..

Even though the religious explanation was crumbling at it's foundations religious creationists  still presume that it must have been an intelligent source (deity), which orchestrated it all ..

But instead of providing an answer, this  only adds a new question: what made this intelligence come in to existence ?  to assume that this intelligent designer always has existed is the religious way out, meant  discourage believers to look what is behind that horizon of knowledge and creates a loop of circular reasoning that has no end, nor beginning ..

I see a new mystery that yet has to be explained,  that does not need some intelligent agent in the commencing of the universe, why not assume that the universe has always been there ?

It is something that we cannot comprehend, maybe their will become a day when we can.

The comprehension of mankind has grown epically in the past 200 years.

For example think of this:

Suppose you would be able to travel back in time and find  most fearless knight of the middle ages

Hellraiser characters

Then transport him  for 10 minutes to a 21st century  I-MAX theater and  show him a scene from the horror movie Hell Raiser.

Of course  all in THX surround full blast and then transport him back to his own time..

This Brave knight would have experienced this as has he has witnessed HELL and was allowed to come back ..

That is the only way he can explain what happened to him..

We in our recent time have learned to comprehend things like the projecting of images on a wall ,remember that the device was called "magic Lantarn" to 3D I-MAX Movies. Now it is explainable to us  because we know how it is made..

In our modern age these things are normal to us after we assimilated the knowledge for that..

Maybe someday we learn to comprehend the things we currently are not yet able to picture in our mind, because to most of us, our imagination is limited by the three dimensional world we have around us ..

Is the Universe fine tuned to sustain life ?

A few days ago I had a discussion with one of microscopic number of creationists here in the Netherlands who argued her perception of a fine tuned universe especially made to sustain life..

Of course I could not say anything to change her mind, but I might have started a thinking process..

Seeing the chaotic dispersion of matter we can observe from earth there is very few indication any order (tuning) at all..
Tuning is the creating of that order I always use my small workshop to picture this in an understandable way .

My workshop is tuned better than the universe, Every tool is in the right place, the most frequently used is the closest at hand , the special tools are further away but still easy to pick because there is a system, order I arranged around the vice , the general tool and workplace on my work bench.

The Universe is like a big cardboard box where the tools are carelessly thrown in after use and when you need them again it takes more time to dig up the right tool than the time you need to repair the object you are working on.

Tuning must be performed by an intelligent force like a sentient being.
In my workshop I am that being someone to arrange everything

The ignorance of religion calls it God when it comes to the Universe.

The universe is the most dangerous place of incomprehensible violent destruction and creation you can ever imagine, places in the cosmos that are gentle towards life are so rare that they are almost non existing.

Picture yourself in the middle of the African Sahara with nothing else than sand , as far as the eye can see..

Try to imagine every grain of sand as a celestial body in the Universe every star and planet.  Now pick up a hand full of sand and that you have in your hand are there you have the possible number of grains of sand that represent places that are more a less friendly to life..

The rest of the universe is Everything is violent, the birth of a star is an explosion of radiation that would disintegrate life to the sub molecular level in a fraction of a second should it be too near of the event .

There is no way of shielding against this destructive radiation.

If the universe is fine tuned by God, he did a terrible job doing so.

The only place we feel fairly safe is the planet we live on and our source of sustaining life  we call the sun . But the sun is also bombarding us with radiation every second, minute, year .. The powerful magnetic field of the Earth disperses most of the solar radiation like a shield in StarTrek but should this field seize to exist, the Sun would become the destructor of all the life on earth.. A few minutes unprotected outside the atmosphere will kill you because there is nothing to breathe..

The universe tuned for life ? ..

If (a) God tuned it, he more likely  created the ultimate minefield around an inescapable "prison resort" we call home.. Earth..

Where would we go ? there is no outside, only a dangerous trip to possible other places that are friendly to life, but they are as few in the Universe as the grains of sand you can hold in your hand compared to all the sand in the Sahara desert

added april 22:

Sail onward, 'till you can't see the horizon.

Space is an ocean..

When ships to sail the void between the stars have been invented there will also be men who come forward to sail those ships.

— Johannes Kepler

 IF the universe would be fine tuned for life, there would be no problem to hop from planet to planet. There would be no vacuum and  breathable air everywhere, It would not be filled with the deadly radiation of exploding stars, black holes or gas clouds of poisonous gases..  Sailing the planets would be common like the trade routs in earth history.   Our solar system would be like all the  continents and islands on earth, space would be like the oceans, and like the (to me) unknown painter of the picture, lots of people have fantasized about this, like visualizing a child's dream..
But it isn't..
The reality is that the Universe is SO hostile to life, that to only survive life needs protection ANYWHERE and always....  Without Earth's powerful magnetic field to protect life, it would be as hostile as the rest of the universe.

People always seem to ask "what is the purpose of life?" 
Personally I would like tho think , the purpose of mankind is to evolve their species' intelligence to a level that they can develop the means to spread out in the universe..
But to achieve this, lots of barriers have to be removed that limit the ultimate obstruction of assimilating knowledge
The almost unclimbable mountains of human greed and the unbreakable wall created by religious dogma of almost all religions... 
Religious dogma that has people believing: 

There's an invisible man ... living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you and he wants MONEY..

 George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008)

If humanity cannot overcome these barriers, the crawling of mankind will never become steps or  strides forward to reach this goal, or even totally come to a halt

Bill Nye - Ken Ham debate

February 4 2014 stayed up for it , watched the youtube stream

In my country that was 1am - 3:30am

Bill Nye was great in what he does best , communicating science and making people curious , wanting to know more..

Ken Ham mentioned "creation science" here by ignoring that it fact he means theology and that has nothing to do with real science
Further on he called Newton Faraday and some others scientists from the past "creationists" completely ignoring that the term creationist emerged at the latest 40 years ago when this became a subject for the first time, roughly a century after these scientists died.
That shows that Ken Ham does not mind to bend the facts a little to his approval.

 I loved it when Bill Nye brought up he total failure of the "Wyoming" , one of the tallest wooden ships ever built, when he explained that the twisting of the 140 meter hull caused the ship too leak constantly and finally was the cause that it sank with all the crew..

At the moment the largest wooden ship is the dutch built Mikhail S Vorontsov of 63.5 meters only the hull took 7 years to make with a crew of 140 people and it is made by laminating the wood, a very modern way of processing wood that first was done in the 20th century

Bill Nye pointed out that Noah and his family were not craftsmen, and they weren't and then they had built a ship bigger than the Wyoming ?

Well Ken ham is building a replica of the ark isn't he ? let's see if that thing will float for even a day and will hold the amount of creatures the bible writes about without sinking ..
Now that THAT would be great proof..

However when Ken Ham asked Bill Nye to name a change in the Evolution that was not there before I was a little disappointed when Bill Nye did not mention the appearance of the lower jaw that can move sideways as well as vertical for chewing vegetables.

This only appeared in the last period of the dinosaurs..

But hey , Bill Nye still was the most convincing while Ken Ham did not bring anything new and every time fell back to the bible, the most refuted book in history

Of course American "Christians" will disagree with me , and it is their good right to do so, as long as they don't deny me the right to live in real world

When Internet Friends Die

Some of you might know I also post on a website called "sodahead.com"

Edit: this website no longer exists. It's owner Jason Feffer
decided to lock all of it's creators out and switch over to
editorial articles only, causing a million views per day website
to fall down in a matter of weeks,

There I had a friend with the nickname "the thinking woman" who  suddenly disappeared on line..
If it wasn't for a friend of hers, I never would have known that she passed away , it would be like she had left without a trace..

Today I learned that one of my many opponents on that website had passed away, I did not even know that person that much, but it suddenly reminded me of my friend and decided to share this story with you who read it.

For you who are interested, here is a link to the tribute I wrote to her on Sodahead.

rest-in-peace-thinking-woman

It might be enlightening to read that first

The text of that particular post does not tell all..
It does not tell how her illness was unnoticed until it was too late..
It does not tell what lead to her death..
I have held this inside for too long now but to my opinion the American justice system killed her.
It killed her in the same way as it turned Treyvon martin  in to a criminal and George Zimmerman in to some sort of hero..



The Thinking Woman, her name was Katelyn , Kate in short and I met her on Sodahead.com
At that time she had another account under the name  Forever Liberal, she kinda rescued me when I had one of my first collisions with the immense stupid right wing idiots that seem to infest that website.
I liked the way she wrote and we became friends, and soon we chatted on MSN and later we used Skype and I grew to love her..
She was  so smart, so gentle, well educated so in touch with reality it was like everything I ever wanted
After a while of chatting and talking at a certain moment she wanted to move to me in the Netherlands to escape her life and grow old here together, far from the turmoil of American politics racism and hate..
But something happened that destroyed our dream and took Katelyn's life in the process..

Kate  was the daughter of a Scottish father and a Cherokee mother.
Her father was a Police man killed  by members of the KKK as I remember correctly somewhere in the 1960's
Her mother passed away a few years later, she went to school college university and earned several Ph.D's and became a high school teacher when she met her later to be husband who was the son of a wealthy republican stockbroker ..
After they married she gave birth to a son and soon after that she discovered that she made the biggest mistake of her life by marrying this man.

He turned out to be a wife beater of the worst kind, he even tortured her with a knife and lent her out to friends who raped her ..
She became a prisoner in her own house , her husband made sure that he never left any visible marks so to the outside world it stayed unnoticed..
The only joy in her life was her son and working with horses..
After a few attempts to run away that were stopped by her in law family she finally filed for a divorce and had her chance to move away from this abusive monster...
She had to give everything up , to have him agree to this divorce, it took all her personal savings and it was not even sure that she would get custody over her son..
Then disaster struck..
On one day her soon to be ex husband came to pick up the child , then 4 years old for "a day with his father" and he drove his car in to a tree killing both him and the child instantly ..
Katelyn of course was devastated by the death of her son ..
Because the divorce was not yet final, she inherited everything that had belonged to her dead husband, but because her in law family accused her of driving their son to suicide , they made sure she never saw a penny of that ..

She moved from place to place to stay out of the reach of the hate of her ex father in-law but somehow every time he manage to find her..
At the moment we met on Sodahead, she thought she had shook him and she made herself a life as horse whisperer, she did wonders with ex race horses which were so stressed and crazy because of this life of competition and finally were sold with the purpose of breeding..
When she told me about this work I heard the passion in her voice, the love she had for these horses and then she told me about her past and the horrible things she had to go through with her husband , and she told me about her ex inlaw family who had made it a task to make her life as miserable as possible ..
Shortly after that this plan of moving in together in my place was born, she would be far out of reach of her ex in law family and we wold start a new life together .
We made wild plans to erase the trail to the Netherlands, she would first fly to southern France and then take the train to Paris and then to Amsterdam where I would meet her ..
This was a really exiting time , she was constantly on Skype talking with me and my son who's name she never could pronounce right and some times led to hilarious sounding tongue twisters

In august 2011 we decided to speed things up after she told me that her ex father in law had found her again and cursed her out on the phone.
She lived in a secure gated housing complex so she was not too worried about getting unwanted visitors..
In September 2011 I got a different message from her , telling me she was brutally attacked by some man  in the stables of the farm she worked with a horse , the farmer saved her by hitting her attacker unconscious with a shovel but Kate was in bad shape ..
The police took her attacker and threw him in prison but after a day he was bailed out .....  by her ex Father in law.
And that was not all, he provided this attacker with a dream team of high paid lawyers.

The day after that Kate told me that it was worse than she first told me , this attacker had brutally raped her an was about to kill her when her friend the farmer knocked him out with a shovel, I was furious and desperate at the same time , I wanted her to get out of there far away from this..
But she wanted to testify and see this rapist in jail to prevent this from happening again..
Because there was something strange going on and the police and D.A. was acting strange I asked her if she could find some private investigator to find out what was really going on..
She did and found a retired cop who worked as a P.I.  he found clues that this rapist could have been hired by her ex Father in law to kill her , but the killer messed up by raping her first and so wasting tome so the farmer came just in time to knock him out..

The DA. saw the danger Kate was still in so he ordered to take her to a safe house. The only things she could bring with her were her clothes and after insisting she could bring her Laptop so we would not lose contact ..
From that moment the only thing she wanted was leave and never return , even if this would mean dropping the charges..
But it became a federal case because the killer turned out to be well known to the police and this time they would have a good case to convict him.
Don't ask me for details but because of that the charges could no longer be dropped and she had to stay in the US until after the trial.

So the plan to move away from there had to wait
From this safe house we had contact on a regular basis and I did my best to comfort her as far as this is possible over the Internet ..
I sang her songs in front of the camera , and to take her mind of it
The trial started in February 2012 and this became a sickening event of character assassination started, discrediting Kate, turning her in to some whore in the eyes of the Jury..
They even called the men who raped her in the presence of her ex husband (all "respected" wealthy conservative business men) and from that moment I noticed her desperation.. 
Some times there were good moments , but most of the time we were talking about the day she would move to the Netherlands ..
She told me how the stress and hardship of this trial negatively influenced her diabetes and that sometimes she had to spend a day or two in the hospital..

Then the lowest dirtiest trick was pulled to break Kate's spirit, on the list of "witnesses" was the name of her son who died in that accident..  it was a really despicable move of the defense but it gave birth to a strange hope that her son she loved so much was still alive after all ..
She told the Ex cop PI to search for the death certificates, which turned out to have disappeared ...

these are actual shots of that birds

Then it became spring 2012 I had a web cam in a bird's nest box and she was really thrilled by seeing these precious blue tits building their nest and laying eggs , we were jokingly calling them our children..
March passed by and the defense team hired by Kate's ex father in law really did a number on her, and she told me how much weight she had lost during the weeks of this trial, and then she told me that her house , where she hadn't been for months, was torched back in December , and she was never told this ..
In April it all ended in a miss trial and Kate lost all courage , only the birds nest could make her feel better..
In the morning of April 14 (USA time still April 13) she told me she had been to the hospital again and that she was so tired she really wanted to sleep and we said goodbye..
That afternoon the eggs in the bird's nest hatched but Kate never saw them because she passed away that day..

This whole sham of a trial had took so much of her strength of her Indian spirit that it went totally unnoticed that she had cancer, and this cancer had consumed her broken body without any resistance because the American Justice System broke her and finally killed her ...

SHIT I HATE THIS RIDICULOUS AMERICAN SYSTEM THAT ALLOWS IT TO HAPPEN THAT MURDERERS AND RAPISTS WALK FREE AND INNOCENT PEOPLE ARE TRAMPLED

This whole affair took such a  bite out of me that it never leaves my mind , I constantly carry it with me..

Why the USA public should be proud of people like Manning and Snowden..

American people have real problems seeing the difference between whistle blowers and traitors .. US army private Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for passing classified documents to whistle blowing platform  wikileaks ..

Bradley Manning

What were these documents really were about, is long swept under the rug of smoke screens by the government misinformation machine and bought and paid for Commercial American news media..
Bradly Manning exposed how in Iraq the American Military shot civilians and a news crew from a helicopter..
Bradly Manning was an honest young boy who saw gruesome things being covered up by his superiors and saw it as his duty to make this public ..
That he embarrassed the government and over inflated self image of the average American public does not make him a traitor but he has been successfully discredited and is now paying with 35 years of his life..

Now the character assassination machine of the government, and without questioning taken over by the Commercial American News Media, can write another victory to it's name.
*Character Assassination = Vicious personal verbal attacks, especially  intended to destroy or damage a public figure's reputation.
This propaganda system completely destroyed the integrity of one of the bravest men of current day : Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden

About Snowden, I have to agree with what I friend of mine said on Sodahead .com

(quote)
Snowden held off on releasing docs proving govt wrong doings because he believed Obama's promise about transparency andintegrity in govt dealing....
When he realized it was just more of the same old same old he did what a genuine patriot would do,
How is releasing documents revealing that the NSA spies on porn habits a danger to Americans?Or revealing spying on allies? Illegal spying on allies? and American citizens?
Snowden has released nothing that endangers national security, he merely embarrassed the government..
He is currently in the former Soviet Union because Russians are not intimidated by America
(end quote)

Snowden is no different than we are, we also try to publicly expose the dirty government tricks aren't we ? Only we have to rely on information what corrupt news media, news websites and Youtube can present ..
NOBODY in politics listens to us, we are the crazies, the conspiracy theorists..
Except because of Snowden delivering PROOF so now we know that the NSA saves files of everything we write, so they know exactly who can oppose the shady wheeling and dealing of the "people behind the screens"

Snowden is a man of integrity, more than we are, as armchair political commentators,  safely hiding behind nicknames and a computer screens..
TRAITORS SELL SECRETS FOR MONEY OR OTHER PERSONAL GAIN and do anything to keep their identity a secret..

Snowden didn't , he went public sacrificed everything he had, his future, his personal life, his safety (he will never be safe again in his entire life) to expose things the USA (NSA=USA) is doing to its OWN PEOPLE and to its ALLIES

THINGS THAT ARE VERY VERY WRONG

Instead of believing this character assassination process people should be glad , no ecstatic about whistle blowers and DEFEND people like Manning and Snowden !
Men who try to wake people up from their ignorant lethargy ..

Are you angry now? you should be (at your government)