Celestial revelations

Once or twice a week I volunteer to sort book donations for our local Friends of the Library biannual book sale.  This particular event, held in May and October and sponsored by the Tompkins County Friends of the Library, is one of the biggest used book sales in the United States -- we process a half a million books a year.  It's an amazing event, raises much-needed money for our library system, and is a must-attend for any bibliophiles.

It hardly needs saying that the sale is one of the high points of the year for me.  I always come back with a huge box of books, because I clearly don't have enough books already.  As the volunteers' presale is on April 27, I've already been snooping around up and down the aisles in the warehouse, scouting out what books I want to pounce on before anyone else has an opportunity to get their grubby mitts on 'em.

Sorting incoming books is a lot of fun, not only because the people I work with are lovely, but because it's highly entertaining to see what people choose to donate.  I've noticed that there seem to be themes -- one day we'll be inundated with books on anthropology, the next gardening, the one after that murder mysteries or religion or science fiction.  There's nothing odd about this, when you stop to think about it.  We all have our obsessions, reading-material-wise, so when people clear out their shelves it's understandable that we'd end up with piles of donations from the same genres.

When I was there last Wednesday, the Theme of the Day was the occult.  We had psychic stuff and reincarnation and crystals and astrology and Tarot card interpretation, as well as about twenty books by the famously loony Graham Hancock.  None of this was all that remarkable.  But then I ran into three copies of a book I kinda-sorta remembered hearing about -- The Urantia Book -- and by the third time, I asked one of the other sorters if she knew what it was.

She didn't.  She, like myself, had heard the name, knew it was connected with the occult somehow, but that was about it.

So when I got home, I looked it up, and it's quite a story.

Cover of the first edition (1955) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The whole thing seems to have been the brainchild of one William S. Sadler, although Sadler said he acted only as a channel and that the pages of the original manuscript "materialized" between 1924 and 1935.  Sadler is a curious figure; he was a doctor and an early "health food" promoter, whose wife Lena (Kellogg) Sadler was the niece of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes.  Sadler started out being a debunker of psychic claims, and in fact wrote a book called The Mind at Mischief in which he exposed fraudulent mediums and their methods of hoodwinking the gullible.

But then... something happened.  It's unclear if Sadler had a change of heart, or if (like the cynical, bored book publishers who decided to out-conspiracy the conspiracy theorists in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum) he figured he could come up with his own loony idea that would fool people way better than the two-bit mediums he'd debunked.  Whichever it was, in 1924 he launched into a claim that he had become the focus of a "strange communication from a group called the Celestials." 

So he and some friends got together to write it all down.

These writings, which run to two thousand pages, are what were eventually compiled into The Urantia Book.  It wasn't published until 1955 -- because, Sadler said, there'd been questions he and his team had that needed to be "clarified by the Celestials."

But when it finally did hit the presses... wow.

The "Urantia Foundation" -- formed to coordinate printing and sales of the book -- reports that it's still a hot seller.  Between 1990 and 2000, annual sales went up by over a factor of five (from 7,000 to 38,000).  It became downloadable in 2010, and since then averages around 60,000 downloads a year.  Brad Gooch, in his book Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, says that the number of Urantia study groups and online discussion groups has been going up steadily in the last ten years and is showing no sign of leveling off.

I'll be honest; I haven't read the book itself and have no real intention to, but the excerpts I've found online strike me as fairly innocuous.  There's a lot of talk about all of us having the "Divine Spark" or an "Indwelling Presence" that guides us toward good behavior, and a "Thought Adjuster" that steers us away from sinfulness.  It seems to have no particular quarrel with other religions and philosophies; the attitude is that they all got some things right and some things wrong, so y'know, we're all on this journey together, live and let live, I'm okay you're okay everyone's okay.  And aliens, but they're okay, too.

Honestly, it's all pretty tolerant and friendly-sounding.  Me, I'd take this over evangelical Christianity in a heartbeat, even if Sadler did make the whole thing up.

What's curious about the people who believe this really is a more-or-less divine revelation from all-knowing Celestial Beings, though, is when it gets to the parts about science -- because in a lot of places, it got the science wrong.  And the really interesting part is that the things they got wrong were, oddly enough, wrong in exactly the way that you'd expect from an entirely non-Celestial human who was writing in the 1920s.  It describes the formation of the Solar System via something that sounds an awful lot like the 1905 Chamberlin-Moulton Planetesimal Hypothesis, which was widely accepted in the 1920s but ruled out on the basis of inconsistencies with known physical principles by Lyman Spitzer and Henry Norris Russell in 1940.  It states that the Andromeda Galaxy is "almost one million light years away" -- once again, the accepted value in the 1920s, before better measurements showed that it's well over double that distance.  Back then, too, the whole "fundamental particle" thing was really taking off, and there was no certainty of how deep the well went -- whether particles would prove to be divisible into ever tinier and tinier pieces with no end, or if there really were fundamental, indivisible particles.  Well, Urantia says that all the known particles are composed of a fundamental smaller piece called an "ultimaton;" electrons, for example, are made of a hundred of them.

Unfortunately for Urantia and the Celestials, however, the Standard Model of Particle Physics, one of the most extensively-tested models in all of science, finds no evidence of "ultimatons," and electrons really do appear to be fundamental and indivisible.

So my problem is that if you're expecting me to accept that this really is some kind of revealed truth -- either from a deity, or at the very least, from some super-smart aliens -- then why'd they get the science demonstrably wrong?  And if they got the facts wrong, on what basis should I believe anything else they say?

As generally "nice" as their philosophy seems to be, I have my doubts.

Anyhow, now I know way more about The Urantia Book than I did.  If you're intrigued, and going to be in Ithaca during the first week of May, you can pick up a copy or three at the book sale.  Today I'll be heading down in an hour or so to do my shift sorting more books.  I wonder what the Theme of the Day will be?  Sports?  True Crime?  Graphic Novels?  Self-Help?

Amish Romances?  I kid you not, there's a whole shelf full of Amish Romances.

When you deal with a half a million books a year, there's bound to be something for everyone.

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What's the harm?

One of the questions I get asked pretty frequently, apropos of my work as a debunker and critic of woo, is "What's the harm?"  So what if people want to believe in astrology or divination or whatnot?  Surely it's harmless to check your horoscope daily or make your decisions on your latest Tarot card reading.  Just leave people alone and let them do whatever floats their boat.

The problem is, these kinds of beliefs aren't harmless.  I see three different ways in which such practices generate a potential for direct harm.  First, belief in something despite a complete lack of evidence establishes a habit of credulity; so your acceptance of something fairly benign (like astrology) can predispose you to believe something that isn't benign at all (like the claim that homeopathy is a legitimate way to treat human disease).  Once you've fallen for one bit of nonsense, the next one is that much easier to fall for.

Second, a great many of the people who are purveyors of this nonsense are in it for one reason: money.  They are happy to relieve you of your hard-earned cash in exchange for a tissue of lies.  One good example of this is faith healing, which even today brings its practitioners millions of dollars a year, ripped off from the gullible and the desperate.

Last, though, is that some forms of woo -- the ones that, like homeopathy and faith healing, claim to alleviate something real, something with an actual physical cause -- lead people to abandon practices that might actually work, and seek out what amounts to magic.  And that brings me to Christina Lopes, a self-styled "healer and life coach."

I ran into Christina Lopes over at the r/skeptic subreddit, where someone posted one of her videos along with some rather acidic commentary.  I'd never heard of her, so I decided to watch the video.

In order to save you a half-hour of your life that you'll never get back, allow me to summarize the main points.

First, she says we're all "ascending."  Our bodies, supposedly, are in the process of transforming into something "higher."  What she means by "higher" is never defined in any rigorous way, but apparently it has to do with two things -- your "light quotient," the amount of light your body can hold, and the rate at which you're vibrating.  Lopes subscribes to the idea that the faster something is vibrating, the better it is, an idea you'd think anyone would realize is false just based on sound waves.  (If you don't believe me, you listen to a guy playing a solo piccolo for an hour, and I'll listen to a guy playing a cello, and we'll see who has a headache afterward.)  Better still, consider that claim applied to the light she likes talking about so much; compare the effect on the body of very high-frequency light (e.g. gamma rays) as compared to lower-frequency light (e.g. visible light).

I know which one I'd want bombarding me.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Salma2789, Spirit man, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So far, nothing so different than a lot of these kinds of wacky spiritual claims.  But then she goes into the health effects of "ascension," and that's where things get dangerous.

She says that when you start "ascending," it's hard on the body.  Our cells (which she claims are sentient) "literally purge themselves of lower energy."  If she means "literally" literally, it's hard to fathom why the scientists have never detected this energy purge, since you'd think it would be measurable somehow.  But she goes on to tell us that this phase of things creates some real physical symptoms -- muscle inflammation, which "could be anywhere" including your chest, and mental agitation (disjointed, dark, or violent thoughts).  If this happens to you, she says, don't be afraid, because fear is a "dense emotion" which will just make things worse.  You should also increase water intake, because "water is a conductor of energy."  (Good idea, but for the wrong reason.)

At this point, she's moved into the realm of advice that could cause actual harm.  The symptoms she describes -- inflammation and mental agitation -- can be the result of real, and potentially serious, medical conditions.  Believing her bullshit explanation about this being just a natural result of "ascension," and nothing to worry about, means someone might forgo legitimate medical treatment, perhaps until it's far too late.  (For fuck's sake, chest pains and mental agitation are signs of a heart attack.  If you're feeling this, don't mess around with wondering if you're "ascending," get your ass to a hospital now.)

It's to be hoped that the scope of damage she's doing is limited; not only is she not especially widely-known (I couldn't find any mention of her on RationalWiki, for example), but fortunately a lot of the little aches and twinges we experience, and many of the disjointed or chaotic thoughts, are completely normal and not the sign of any dire problems.  But one person dying of cancer because he thought his symptoms were signs of "ascension," and he put off seeing a doctor, is way, way too many.

It's amazing how quickly beliefs can move from "weird but basically harmless" to "actively dangerous."  The problem is, setting aside rational thought so you can accept the former means you'll be much more likely to accept the latter without question.  All the "your body is light" and "high-frequency vibrations are good" stuff is innocuous enough; but as you can see from Lopes's video, those lead directly to "here are some real physical symptoms you shouldn't worry about."

I don't see any way to stop her from posting her videos; her advice is mostly vague enough that trying to establish culpability for harm in a legal sense would be next to impossible.  Failing that, the best we can do is to stress once again how important education in critical thinking is.  Not to mention a solid background in actual science.  If enough people call this out as the bullshit it is, purveyors of snake oil like Christina Lopes will be permanently out of a job.

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The crazy is strong with this one.

Here I am, waiting for the cataclysm that is supposed to happen in a little less than three weeks (I do so love a good apocalypse!), without realizing that something amazing is supposed to happen next week.  December is going to be so jam-packed, I just don't know if I can handle it.

I refer, of course, to 12/12/12.  At 12:12 (and 12 seconds).  Amazing things will happen.  Amazing things always happen when a human-designed, human-defined chronology hits some set of numbers that forms a pattern.  For example, I'm sure you all remember the chaos that ensued when my odometer hit "77,777" a couple of weeks ago.  I said, "Huh."  And then I kept on driving.  (I was a little upset when my car hit 66,666 miles, however.  I was expecting Satan to show up, and at least give me a certificate, or something, but nothing happened.)

So based upon my experience with the odometer, we should all brace ourselves for transformative events to occur next Wednesday at a little after noon.  (It is unclear which time zone we should be setting our clocks to, in order to be ready for said events, so I plan on being vigilant all day, or at least until I get bored.)

I found out about all of this in an acutely painful half-hour during which I read various posts on the site "Earth Keeper Chronicles."  This website has some of the most concentrated crazy I've ever seen.  Just consider some of the titles of the posts:

"Easter Island - Rapa Nui 144: The umbilical of the new Earth."
"Standing waves of the crystal vortex."
"Parallels of OmniEarth: The Kingdom of Fae"
"The Crystal-Electric-Auric as the manifold of power & auric effects of air travel"
"Arkansas: Quakes, grids, triple-date portals crysto coding the sun disc"
"Metatronic keys: The Mer-Ki-Va crystalline light body polarity clarification"

It's almost like someone took a bunch of woo-woo articles, shredded them, and then pulled out one word at a time at random and wrote them down.

And of course, I had to check out at least one of the actual posts, a move I now heartily regret because I hear that brain damage is irreversible.  The one I chose, for no very good reason, was "The ascension and the 144 - crystal grid."   Here are the opening paragraphs, just so you can get a flavor for what every post on this website is like:

The Crystalline Grid is the energetic lattice that covers our planet. It reflects and amplifies our ascending levels of consciousness. It is a crystalline 'light' matrix that was anchored in 1992, five years after the harmonic convergence. Although in place and functional, its total activation will involve 12 phases, with full resonant vibratory rate achieved on the 12-12-12 ...December 12, 2012.The 'triple' dates ( 01-01-01 thru 12-12-12) that occur uniquely for the next 12 years each carry numeric light codes that open & activate each of the 12 major pentacle facets of this amazing template.

Visualize the grid as a geodesic sphere, of pentagons and triangles, sparkling as a faceted, brilliant diamond. It is a seed crystal of new form, the double penta-dodecahedron. Its time has arrived, merkaba of Earthstar. The double penta dodecahedron has 144 facets, the number of Christ ascension. Each dodecahedron has 12 major pentacles with 60 facets, add the 12 truncated pentagons for 72, and double this for 144 !

The concept of planetary grids is not a new one. Plato theorized the concept as did the ancient Egyptians, Mayans and Hopi Indians. In a sense, grids are the template, the window 'program', if you will, that allows all life to accelerate in the graduated light format that is called the ascension.

If you will, the crystalline Ascension Grid, is 'Windows 2012' , and indeed, it is quite necessary for our ascension.

There is not one, but three grid templates surrounding our planet effecting human life. The three are separate, yet intricately related. The three become the one. The grids have separate functions relating individually to: (1) planetary gravitational field, (2) telluric electromagnetics, and (3) crystalline consciousness.

The Gravity grid is both within and on surface of the planet. It is anchored to the spinning crystalline core of the earth. It is in the form of a dodecahedron, a sphere with 12 facets. It is primarily rooted in the first three dimensions. The dodecahedron was the primary consciousness geometric of the planet from the time of the deluge of Atlantis, until the emergence of the icosahedron about 4,000 BC.

And this goes on for pages.  Basically every trope from every woo-woo website you've ever heard, blenderized and poured out, over and over and over.  It's kind of sad when a skeptic finds a website that badly needs debunking, and doesn't know where to start.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the website (and all of its publications) have been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.  Because obviously, we don't just want this nonsense to be available to English speakers only.  We've got to make sure that people in Bulgaria, for example, are as confused as we are.

Anyhow, I don't have much more to say about this one, except that I'm looking forward to next Wednesday, to see what happens when the last of the twelve "numeric light codes" opens up.  Given the amazing transformations we saw on 11/11/11, 10/10/10, and so on, I think we can count on its being a pretty stupendous day.  I'm gonna stock up on beer and potato chips.  I figure that even if nothing happens on the 12th, I can save it for the 21st, when the apocalypse is supposed to happen.  You can never have too much beer and potato chips during an apocalypse.
 

What the frack?

Diane Tessman is at it again.  Yes, the woman who believes that clouds are camouflage for UFOs, who believes that organisms evolve, Pokémon-like, to obtain advanced powers, has now weighed in on another topic:

Hydrofracking.

If you're thinking, "Oh, this is gonna be good," you don't even know the half of it.  (Source)

Because it isn't, she said, Diane Tessman speaking; it's a superpowerful alien entity named Tibus who is speaking through her.  And boy, is Tibus annoyed with the way we've been treating Mother Earth.  He starts out, though, with a news bulletin meant to put us at ease:

 Star people, this is Tibus. I come to you in love and light.

I am smiling as I greet you, my star friends/co-workers! I am also smiling at a UFO report from North Carolina; a man was out looking for a good place to hunt (I hope we was sufficiently distracted by his UFO sighting and did not hunt), when he spotted a low flying rectangular craft with 4 amber lights. “Rectangular” is not aerodynamic but because of advanced propulsion (anti-gravity) methods, we can use rectangles, squares, tubes, and so forth. Usually, however, we like the grace and beauty of a saucer-shaped craft and have found we actually fly them more efficiently than the cumbersome-looking craft. I hasten to add that the craft this man saw belongs to a small group within Space/Time Intelligence, but not directly to any of those folk, nor their ethnic groups, who send messages to you through Diane.

Oh, good.  If they are operating within Space/Time Intelligence, I guess they're welcome to visit North Carolina.  If the craft was populated by gay aliens attempting to find a nice place to get married, however, they might want to try a different venue.

After assuring us that the UFOs we see are here on a peaceful scientific mission, and that their crews have no intention of strapping us to examining tables and implanting microchips in our skulls, Tibus/Diane goes on to the topic at hand: the natural gas industry.

Hydraulic fracking, a process which extracts natural gas, has added to the danger from the New Madrid Fault, to a huge degree. Old fashioned fracking was hurtful to Earth but not potentially catastrophic. However, modern hydraulic fracking creates a real earthquake danger and also gobbles up the water table over a vast area, right when earth needs every drop of her fresh water supply. What fresh water is not gobbled up, is left toxic and hopelessly contaminated.

So, Tibus, if we can't do natural gas extraction because hydrofracking is too dangerous, what do we do to find a source of energy?

Here is the answer: We offer Earth free energy, which was discovered by a human being, Nikola Tesla, so certainly humankind should benefit from it. Free energy was taken away from the human race very wrongly, by greedy (yes), humans who saw they could make lots of money through non-free forms of energy. We of Space/Time Intelligence now offer free energy again, freely.

Isn't that nice?  Free energy that's freely free!  Wouldn't that be freeing?  But how can we be sure that Tibus really knows what Tesla was up to, when he discovered free energy?

Tesla is with me and says that technically, alien races had discovered what he called free energy, eons before he did, but I respond to Tesla that he is being “too” conscientious, because we consider a new invention or creation to be brand new each time it is discovered by a different species on a different world. I remind him that there are wondrous ancient beings in the universe who have already discovered what we of Space/Time Intelligence have discovered, only eons before we did. Peel away the onion layers, and they are astoundingly endless. So, Tesla did discover free energy, which we use; it involves relatively simple anti-gravity techniques.

Oh.  Okay.  Simple anti-gravity techniques.  Since Tesla is right there with you, would you mind asking him how we're going to manage that?  The law of gravity, so far as I've noticed, seems to be strictly enforced in most jurisdictions.  But maybe that's just my perception because I'm stuck in the wrong layer of the Cosmic Onion.

The good news, though, is that we don't just have to rely on help from dead physicists in figuring all of this out: we also have the "God Cloud."  What, you might ask, is the God Cloud?

Some of you have asked about the God Cloud: It is a being, ancient and advanced, who offers to help. It is more ancient and advanced than any of us in Space/Time Intelligence. It is, for all intents and purposes, pure intelligence.

It traveled from a distant star cluster to help, and has “parked” near Earth. It is simply a stellar cloud of highly advanced particles of consciousness which/who function as ONE.

But how can the God Cloud, for all of its "advanced particles of consciousness," help us?

When the time is right (the micro-second when Earth reaches critical mass of enlightenment), it will throw its pure intelligence, pure enlightenment, into the electromagnetic field of Earth which will have just shifted (thus human minds will have just shifted upwards), and it will stabilize and enhance the new EM field on which human minds will function thereafter.

For those of you concerned if the God Cloud is committing “suicide” to do this, no it is not. It will remain a sovereign entity within the new EM field, and it will gather itself up as ONE, and leave when things settle down.

Whew.  I know I'm relieved.  I already had my hand on the Space/Time Intelligence Suicide Hotline.

So, anyway, that's today's hopeful message from the Land of Woo-Woo: we should stop hydrofracking because it pisses off Mother Earth, Nikola Tesla, and an alien named Tibus, but don't worry because free energy is just around the corner, not to mention an extraterrestrial super-intelligent cloud who is there to help us achieve a stable electromagnetic field of enlightened human consciousness.  I'm so glad we have Tibus around to advise us, aren't you? Maybe next time he could weigh in on such Universal Mysteries as why so many people these days seem to believe absurd, counterfactual nonsense.  I wonder what Tibus might have to say about that.

Greetings from the Galactic Federation

While rooting around for a topic for today's post, I checked out one of my favorite woo-woo sites, AboveTopSecret.  One of the headline posts said, "Is the Galactic Federation Real?"  I clicked the link, and it turned out not to be an article, as I'd hoped, but to be a post from a member of the site, and simply reiterated the question in the title of the post.

So I went to the "responses" section.  The first two responses were, and I quote:

"Short answer: No."

"Long answer:  NOOOOOOOOOOO."

So I thought: "Wow, this topic is too wacky even for the readers of AboveTopSecret.  This has got to be good."  So first, I continued to scroll down the responses, and I found that most of them were scornful, and a few said that because this topic had been discussed ad nauseam before, the thread would likely be removed by moderators.  Then someone said, "Of course it will  be removed.  They don't want you to know the truth."  *cue sinister laughter*

At that point, I decided I had to check this out.  So I found the site Galactic Federation of Light.  (Please be forewarned that this site is very slow to load, and in fact resulted in my having to restart my browser twice -- perhaps because the Galactic Federation Overlords were aware that I was accessing their site in order to poke fun at them.)  Be that as it may, this site explains everything you might want to know about the Galactic Federation.

Okay, that's only a true statement if by "explain" you mean "make stuff up."  The site is largely composed of a series of dated posts, each stating who said it and some including which Galactic Federation Master (s)he was channeling at the time.  Here is a sampling:

Your planet is literally surrounded with craft from all corners of the universe as all beings vie for ringside seats to the greatest show in the galaxy. Your world has long been highly regarded as one of the finest spiritual schools in the universe and entry into this University has been highly sought after. Now, you are on the precipice of a school-wide graduation, and you are center stage for the family that has come from all parts of the universe to attend the graduation ceremonies.  (Galactic Federation through Wanderer From The Skies, July 14, 2011)

All I can say is, I hope the speeches are better than the ones at most of the graduation ceremonies I've been to.  And if someone decides to read the names of all seven billion graduates, I'm leaving.

The next three or four months are destined to be eye opening, and you will know for sure that the big changes are on the way. After all the year speeds by and before you know it, it will be the magical year of 2012. So get ready to button up your safety belts and enjoy the ride. It can be seen as good or bad as you want it to be, so see the goal that is being aimed for and not the manner in which it is to be reached. All you need know is that it results in all you have been promised. It will be an unbelievable time with one surprise after another, and celebrations will be taking place.

I am SaLuSa from Sirius, and tell you that our ships are gathering for the grand announcement that will allow us to land on your Earth by invitation.  (SaLuSa / through Mike Quinsey, 20th July 2011)

Well, given that this was posted last summer, and I don't remember Autumn 2011 as being all that eye-opening, I guess SaLuSa from Sirius might have gotten his wires crossed somehow.

Since the posts were in chronological order, I decided that like the Brothers of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, I needed to skip a bit, so I scrolled down to more current posts.  From April of 2012 I found the following:

Dratzo! We return! The great shift that your world is undergoing was first predicted by the Ancients over 13,000 years ago. It is part of what they called 'the great galactic year.' Heaven is to honor this time by establishing a great Light, which will wash away the dark and all its minions. We were asked, over 20 of your years ago, to come here and be ready at an appointed time to carry out a mass landing of our personnel on your precious shores. And so we came, and then saw that Heaven's dates for this undertaking were somewhat unclear. So we adapted, and proceeded to use these moments to get to know you better. Since our arrival here, we have become part of a sacred movement to prepare Gaia's surface humans for the requirements of the divine decrees for this planet. One of them specifies the need to resolve the issue of the dark minions' labyrinth of control on your planet through sacred cleansing. In the main this will start with a formal, immense change in the way your societies operate and in the way you perceive the nature of your reality.  (Washta, Sirius Star-Nation, Galactic Federation of Light & Ascended Masters, 17th April 2012)

"Dratzo?"  Is this some kind of greeting from Sirius, or something?  I think we should all begin to greet each other in this fashion from now on, so that "Washta" and his buddies feel at home when they arrive.

"Washta" had a further missive that he delivered last Tuesday:

Dratzo! We return! We have been informed that several major banks worldwide are nearly ready to transfer ownership and management. This is part of the massive shift of financial power out of the hands of the dark into those of the Light, and is the result of recent maneuvers by the Ascended Masters.

Furthermore, the time has come to consolidate the funds that were first posited by Saint Germaine in the early 18th century, and by Quan Yin in the 7th century. These large reserves of gold and silver are the basis for shifting wealth on your world away from a select few over to those who are fully committed to the creation of universal prosperity for the planet. Accompanying this transfer is the new banking system which will be completely transparent in its varied transactions. The new banking is rooted in the unprecedented injunction that banks be the divine instruments of the Light. They are to be used to manage various corporations (special partnerships) charged with specific and temporary mandates: to distribute technologies and related services to benefit the health and well being of your global populations.  (Washta, Sirius Star-Nation, Galactic Federation of Light & Ascended Masters, 24th April 2012)

Well, that sounds hopeful enough.  I wouldn't mind it if the banks started being more concerned with the health and well-being of global populations, not to mention getting my share of the universal property.  But at this point, I stopped reading, because I was afraid my browser would crash again, and also because my prefrontal cortex was beginning to make alarming little whimpering noises.

What strikes me about this is that the people who believe this stuff (and there seem to be quite a few, judging from the posts and the comments that followed) go way beyond wishful thinking into that more rarefied air of delusion.  I mean, it'd be nice if there were some Galactic Good Guys who were ready to Storm The Beaches and reorganize world governments so that they Played Nice, but there's just this teensy little problem, which is that there's no evidence whatsoever that any of it is true.  And this brings up a troubling question, to wit:  what is it that makes someone swallow something like this?  I mean, beyond the rather sad answer that the person in question is mentally ill.  And I just can't believe that mental illness accounts for all of the believers in conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, cults, superstitions... and Galactic Federations.

I actually know people who are seemingly quite rational, who hold down jobs and raise families and interact socially, and yet who have some pretty bizarre beliefs on a single topic -- astrology, homeopathy, HAARP, the Illuminati, psychic contact with animals.  What in the human brain can become so unhinged, in an otherwise intact mind, that a person loses the ability in that instance (and that instance only) to decide if something is real, has supporting evidence, makes sense?

I don't know the answer, but I do think the whole thing is a little scary.  So I'll end on that note.  Well, I do have one more thing to say:  Dratzo!