Good Movie on Sleep Paralysis

There's a movie on Netflix that came out last year on the subject of sleep paralysis that's very much worth watching. I don't seem to have it much anymore, but I went through a lot of this 15 years ago. What cured me? It sounds silly, but I noticed that in certain esoteric writings it was suggested that people who were trying to have an out of body experience during meditation should make sure the head of their bed was pointed north. (Something to do with the magnetic north and magnetic fields in your brain I guess.) I figured that if this would help people induce an OBE, then pointing your bed in a different direction might help stop them. My dad (who lived across town at the time) and I both had this problem of SP plus having nightmares. After checking with a compass, I found that both of us had our beds pointing north. I reoriented them to the east, and our problems pretty much went away for good. Strange, but true. The movie is called The Nightmare:

The Nightmare

The Savior of Country Music?

Mo Pitney is just 24. He wrote every song on his first album except one and if anybody could be called the "real deal," it's this guy. He's gonna be huge. Wait and see. By the way, that's his sister, Holly, singing backup with him on this first song. She has a twin brother too, and they often serve as his backup singers.

Clean Up On Aisle Five

Duct Tape and Jesus

Boy & A Girl Thing

I Met Merle Haggard Today

Uninsured Man Pays $57K for Anti-Venom Drug At Mercy Hospital

I saw this on the news last night. A man got bitten by a copperhead. He had no insurance, so Mercy Hospital charged him whatever they darn well felt like. Just more proof that America's health care system is a joke and beyond repair.

News 4 Investigates: The hidden cost of medical care

This is the kind of thing that really makes me angry. If I were president, heads would roll.

Annual Anti-Atheism Rant

All of creation is nothing but random collisions of particles according to atheism. It can be nothing else without a mind at the bottom of the well. Life itself, animation, consciousness, the facade of intelligence, good and evil--all nothing but random collisions. There's a reason why nearly 65% of all scientists believe in a god or at least a higher power. They've actually bothered to think things through to the logical conclusion. Most atheists don't appear to have even begun to think about the ramifications of such a belief system as atheism. Do they not see how ridiculous it sounds saying that they don't believe in god and yet they think people can be "good?" There can be no goodness in the deterministic worldview. Atheists have no business ever calling anything good or bad, ugly or beautiful, right or wrong. If you're an atheist, you should never call the police if someone robs you or beats you or harms you in any way, because those things are just fine in the world of atheism where things just "are" and nothing has any meaning, let alone that of good and evil. Atheism is an ideology for people who do not wish to think. Rather than read Attenborough, you might try reading a more heady paper on the subject such as Chris Langon's Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe which carries out David Bohm's work in quantum potential and merges it with consciousness as the binding agent that unifies the forces of the universe.

Surely you all know the universe is still expanding, right? That same rapid expansion that caused the explosive force (particles banging into particles) at the beginning of the universe is still happening and will go on happening forever. Billions of photons alone pass through your body every second. And every time you take a step across the room, you take on an entirely new body, replacing every particle in it. Actually, you don't need to take any steps. The Earth turning on its axis will take the steps for you. So, not only are you taking on new particles constantly and losing the old ones, the new ones somehow know your age and will keep degrading instead of keeping you looking and feeling new. Wouldn't you expect a brand new set of particles to be fresh and young? How is it they take on the characteristics of older degraded particles when they begin to make up your body? How do they keep such exact shapes? Why does your nose always look like a nose (and the exact same nose) if your particles are always changing? Atoms are made up of mostly empty space. Your body is mostly made up of empty space. Electronic force fields keep all matter together, but how do those forces know to keep such an exact shape as every single person's nose and ears or every blade of grass? If the particles in your brain keep changing and being replaced from second to second, how are you able to reason and retain memories and trains of thought?

Science has never been able to answer the tough questions. It doesn't even try. It just gives names to various phenomena and moves on. Giving something a name does not explain it. Saying animals have instincts does not explain them. How can a Monarch butterfly fly to Mexico every winter to the exact same tree it's grandfather was born in when the young butterfly had never been there before and had never even known its grandfather? Calling such phenomena an "instinct" is an extreme oversimplification, but this is more often than not what science does. Many people like to think the world is somehow this amazing self made machine that just does all this incredible stuff by mere chance from those random collisions of particles when the fact is that it runs much more like a staggeringly elaborate program with very little left to chance. At the same time, there are things that do seem to go wrong from time to time that make little sense to any of us. Why do dumb animals feel pain? It doesn't seem fair. Why do major asteroids hit the Earth every 50 to 100 million years and wipe out most of the life forms? Yes, it's baffling. But that doesn't somehow nullify the fact that the majority of the time, this elaborate program of sorts works amazingly well and not at all like something left to chance. It works so well that the ancient Jews referred to it as the Book of Life, as though life itself were a written script. I don't think they were correct, but I can certainly understand the logic behind the analogy.

No one can say for sure that any person or religion has exactly the right notion of God. I think some, particularly Christianity and Hinduism, are closest to the facts of the matter. But whatever God is happens to be just as beyond our understanding as the mechanisms behind the forces of the universe. That's my opinion anyway. But as Socrates said, "I know nothing."

Flash Computer Art

I haven't drawn in a long time, but I used to dabble in drawing on computer inside Flash. With Flash you're restricted to figures that are sort of cartoonish in nature, so there's no shading, but the neat thing about vector art is that it's completely scalable. You can zoom in as much as you like without losing any detail at all. (You won't be able to zoom in on these images without losing detail because I saved them as jpgs for uploading to Blogger.)

These were all drawn with a mouse by the way. I've tried using those Waco drawing tablet-pen devices and find them more frustrating than anything.

Steve Martin - Atheists Don't Have No Songs

This is hilarious. This is Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers. They've been together for quite a few years now. If you haven't seen them before, you should search through YouTube for some of their songs. They're not only funny but are very good musicians too.

Here they are doing Orange Blossom Special with a bit of King Tut at the end.

And here there are with another tune featuring their amazing fiddle player, Nicky Sanders, playing Auden's Train.

"The Sorrowing Tree" is Now a Video!

My little instrumental tune is now a story and a movie. Happy Easter to all.