just cause it's october

strange quantum things are afoot

I find it interesting how the vast majority of people remember the Berinstein Bears and not the Berinstain Bears.  I was never a fan but I remember the name with a stein and not a stain.  That puts me in the majority, from my bullshit research of asking everybody I see about the proper spelling.

Most just give me a shoulder shrug with a so what attitude but I can't help thinking there's more to this than a general lapse in memory.

It seems there are two camps.  One, who remember absolutely the bears with a stein and those with a stain.  And two, those who are most adamant that stain was always the proper spelling.  The stain to stein camp is roughly 20 to 80, from the information I gathered.  Way more than a simple faulty childhood memory.

There are other memory faults such as the color of Bill Murray's hair on the "Lost In Translation" dvd cover or the date and circumstances of Nelson Mandala’s death.  History has been changed for some of us and I think it's tied to my previous, possible quantum jump. 

I tend to think this sort of thing happens more often than we realize, and once again, I think I have a workable theory.

Due to the rather large number of people who firmly believe the Berinstein Bears were spelled as stein, as opposed to stain that cover every Berinstein Book ever printed, I wonder if these stein people are not of this world but body switched from a parallel reality, en mass, due to a catastrophic event in another reality.  By nature, different parallel realities have slightly different histories and lasting childhood memories might survive the transition.

This "memory fault" has been studied for a few decades.  People from all walks of life were asked to write down on paper where they were at various notable points in history, such as John Lennon’s death or the Challenger space shuttle disaster.  Points in history where the time and place and what they were doing is hard wired to our brain circuitry.  A decade or two later, the same people were asked the same questions and many remembered completely different circumstances.  When shown what they wrote the first time they were asked, these people all said the same thing.  "That's my handwriting but that's not what I said."

To quote Theodore Ted Logan, "Strange things are afoot at the Circle K."     



Thanks Rainbird for the tangent navigation.

just another reality

Here it is.  September 23, 2015 and no sign of a planetary extinction.  I got my lawn chair, my rum, my sunny day, and my mountaintop facing south east and no sign of flying missiles or cosmic debris of any kind.  I feel cheated, not because I'm eager to experience an abrupt end of all life on Earth as much as witnessing a long overdue karmic bitch slap, or at the very least, a cosmic light show.

But, I have a theory.

Yesterday, as I was riding around taking care of business, I saw a gas station with a large sign saying they had cigarettes at the lowest legal prices.  Seeing that sign triggered something and gave me the distinct feeling something wasn't quite right, as if smoking tobacco of any kind was just a totally bizarre concept.  Just as strange was selling gasoline to power these things with wheels everyone was using to move around.  I wasn't losing touch with reality and my memory was intact, but this feeling felt more like a fragment of a fading memory, like a dream that dissolves into forgetfulness as you wake up.  As I drove past buildings, advertisement signs, and other constructs of society I held on to the feeling that there was a general oddness to it all and I felt out of place.  Only the passing wooded areas and blue, chemtrail free sky seemed normal and gave me an overwhelming sense of comfort just looking at them.  The out of place feelings passed but not the memory of the experience and it got me thinking about a few things.

The other worlds theory of quantum mechanics is a very real thing, although damn near impossible to prove.  Right now, in Switzerland, CERN is working on a controlled experiment to open a doorway to a parallel reality using the large hadron collider, or LHC.

These parallel realities exist in the same time and space as this reality with very slight or major differences.  For example, quantum theory suggests at the moment of our death, or for reasons unknown, we body switch with another edition of ourselves in another reality to continue our life path without interruption.  The body switch is imperceptible due to taking over the memories of the new body as well as the familiarity of the parallel reality you switched to.  The assimilation to the new reality is instantaneous and complete.  Life continues as if nothing ever happened but sometimes a bit of memory tags along, like a trail of bread crumbs or the feeling that tobacco use is an alien concept.  To further complicate things, these parallel realities aren't locked into the present reality time but could be a past or future reality.

Body switching and exploration of parallel realities isn't a new concept.  Early baptisms were essentially waterboarding, stimulating the vagus nerve to force the brain to run at 50% instead of the 10% a human brain will ordinarily use.  Shaman’s disease is the scaring of the vagus nerve from repeated over stimulation in their quest to unlock the secrets of the universe through time travel, astro-projection, and parallel reality surfing.

Now we have CERN and the most sophisticated technology, the greatest scientific minds on the planet, and the biggest machine ever created for the purpose of surfing parallel realities without contracting Shaman's disease or losing themselves in the process.  And they're doing this stuff right here and now.

As a side note, when I returned from my road trip, I discovered the Peavey amp I've been using non-stop for the past eight years, and most recently used to power the field generator I specifically designed to run today, September 23, 2015, died yesterday.  It was operational before I left.

In the words of Yogi Berra, who also died yesterday, "It's deja vu all over again."



    

slaughtering the innocent

I first heard about the Sylvia Likens murder from an article in Midnight, a supermarket tabloid that was known to make up sensational news stories.  A week later I read the same story in Time magazine, which proved to me that this horrible crime actually happened.  My first thought was kudos to Midnight for managing to scoop Time magazine, followed by the feeling there must be something more to this story than the insane details.  I mean, there's gotta be reasons that started this fiasco that wasn't reported.  The sad fact was there were no reasons to remotely justify such actions, other than permission from a psychopathic adult.

In Indianapolis, 1965, Sylvia Likens and her sister Jenny (16 and 15 years old, respectively) came to live with a woman from their neighborhood, Gertrude Baniszewski (bani-SHEF-ski), while their parents held jobs traveling with a carnival. Lester and Betty Likens agreed to pay Gertrude $20 a week to board their two daughters, without ever really examining the house where they would be living. Gertrude was a sickly woman who already had seven children. She was depressed and stressed from having lived such a hard life. She began taking her frustrations out on the Likens girls, and eventually Sylvia was the main target. 

Gertrude started the abuse with punishments by paddling with a fraternity-type paddle or a belt. Gertrude soon encouraged her children and other kids from the neighborhood who often visited the Baniszewski house to also abuse Sylvia under the guise of "punishment" for various acts. The abuse escalated. Cigarettes were put out on Sylvia's body (she had over 100 burns on her when she died); Gertrude twice roughly kicked Sylvia in the genitals; she was denied food; had the baby's dirty diaper shoved in her mouth; was kicked and/or thrown down the basement stairs several times; was given baths in scalding hot water; had salt rubbed into her open sores; and was twice forced to stand naked in front of Gertrude and other children and shove a Coke bottle into her vagina. The words "I'm a prostitute and proud of it!" were carved into her stomach with a needle and a crude "3" was burned above this with a hot branding iron. Sylvia never received real medical treatment for her numerous burns and sores, and accompanied with the malnourishment, shock, and repeated blows to the head causing subdural hematoma (brain bleeding or hemorrhaging), Sylvia finally succumbed to her injuries and died on October 26, 1965, only 4 months after arriving at the Baniszewski house.

Growing up, I knew everyone in my town.  If not personally, I knew about them, where they lived, what they did for a living, etc.  Not that we got into anyone's business or anything but if one of them had a 16 year old girl in the basement that was abused on a regular basis we'd know about it.

The tribe I ran with were similar to the Baniszewski kids and their friends, a lively mix of good kids who got in trouble from time to time and hoods that were destined to end up in prison.  About half of us were on probation for petty crimes and on more than a few occasions the state and local police would come to my parents house to question me about various infractions of the law, which made my parents less than happy.

We were no angels and we had a reputation but we all agreed on one thing.  If any of us knew of the kind of abuse inflicted on someone like Sylvia Likens we wouldn't hesitate to pay a visit on them and exact some payback with tire irons and baseball bats.  We couldn't understand how something like this could go on for months without anyone knowing about it.  Hell, we knew who had company from out of town and who was on vacation, where and for how long.  How could Gerty's neighbors not know?  We figured Indiana must be a fucked up place to live.

Some facts... Gertrude Baniszewski had seven kids from two different men.  Her first husband was a cop.  Sylvia's parents had lots of kids and sent them to different places so they could do their carnival thing unhindered by their children.  Only Sylvia and Jenny, her polio inflicted sister, needed to be boarded and their father made the deal with a woman he didn't even know for $20 a week.  Jenny made no attempt to help her sister, even though Sylvia took the punishment instead of Jenny.  At the trial, the kids said they tortured Sylvia because Gerty told them to.  On the stand, Gerty claimed innocence and blamed her own children for everything.  After the trial, Jenny was taken care of by the prosecuting attorney, at the request of Mr. and Mrs. Likens, until they could financially take care of her themselves.  Sylvia died a virgin and Gerty's daughter Paula gave birth to a baby girl during the trial.  She named it Gertrude, in honour of her mother.

I think r/K selection theory might shed some light on this event.

It seems pretty clear that Gertrude didn't much care for raising her own offspring, let along raising someone elses.  The Likens didn't seem to care who took care of their kids, just as long as they didn't have to.  Both families seemed to have a total lack of compassion or feeling towards anyone.  Only Sylvia exhibited the K select character traits of compassion, loyalty, and empathy by sacrificing herself to months of extreme torture to keep her sister from the same fate.  From the first cigarette burn it was clear these girls wouldn't get out alive.  Either that or Gertrude never thought about what she would tell the Likens when they came to pick up their kids.  In the end, the kids blamed Gertrude and Gertrude put the blame solely on the kids.  After all that Jenny was put through, her parents still didn't want her and gave her to another stranger to take care of.  Wild dogs have more compassion.

I have nothing but contempt for both of these families.

Gertrude got parole after 20 years for first degree murder and her kids got a few years for manslaughter.  The one boy is a preacher who found God in prison and the two older sisters are public school teachers.  (I know guys who got more than that for drug possession.)   

Don't you feel safer knowing the world is leaning toward r select conditioning in favor of K select values?